Pope Leo Welcomes Bob Dylan to Vatican After Quoting His Song

Caption: Pope Leo XIV at St. Peter’s Basilica in May 2025. Credit: Edgar Beltran / The Pillar / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Dylan visited Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday, November 4, and the two Americans exchanged gifts in a brief private meeting. Leo gave the singer a rosary; Dylan presented a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. The encounter followed a less obvious connection: the pope had recently quoted a 1963 Dylan anti-nuclear song in a book about peace.

The Associated Press reported that Dylan stopped at the Vatican between Italian concert dates, after a Milan performance and before a scheduled show in Rome. Photographs distributed by the Vatican showed the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter meeting the pontiff. Vatican officials said Dylan had wanted the conversation and that it lasted a few minutes.

In his 2026 book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, Leo referred to Dylan’s early song Go Away You Bomb while discussing nuclear weapons and rearmament. The reference tied a songwriter whose work helped define American protest music to a pope addressing the same subject from a religious and diplomatic perspective.

An unexpected connection through music and faith

Leo, born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955, grew up during the period when Dylan became one of American music’s most influential voices. The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, who helped accompany Dylan at the Vatican, wrote that the pope knew Dylan’s work from that era. The Vatican’s account also identified an unexpected link through St. Augustine, a central figure in Leo’s Augustinian order.

Dylan wrote I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine for his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. The song is part of a catalog that often draws on religious imagery, political upheaval and questions of personal conscience. That song offered another point of reference for officials familiar with the songwriter’s religious imagery.

This was not Dylan’s first meeting with a pope

In 1997, Dylan performed during an event in Bologna that included Pope John Paul II, according to AP. That concert placed popular music alongside a large religious gathering. The 2026 visit was smaller and private, with no reported public performance or formal joint announcement.

Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, recognition of the literary standing of his lyrics. His spiritual history has included a Jewish upbringing and a public turn toward Christianity in the late 1970s. In later interviews he has spoken about religious practice while generally keeping his private beliefs out of public explanation.

After the meeting, Dylan was scheduled to continue his Italian concert itinerary in Rome the following day, while Vatican photographs recorded his exchange of a book for the pope’s rosary.

References: Bob Dylan comes knockin’ on pope’s door as Leo welcomes legend to Vatican