The Nobel laureate who once wrote that “it ain’t even safe no more / in the palace of the pope” walked straight into that palace on Wednesday, November 4, wearing a black hoodie. Pope Leo XIV received Bob Dylan, 85, in the Apostolic Palace for a short private audience, and the two Midwesterners swapped gifts: a rosary from the pontiff, a copy of Dylan’s memoir Chronicles: Volume One from the songwriter.
The Vatican’s own news service called the meeting brief, a matter of greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges. Photos released by the Holy See show the Chicago-born pope in his white cassock beside a singer dressed head to toe in black, gloves and coat included, hood up.
Who set it up
Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit and Vatican official with a long record of building bridges to artists, said on Instagram that he helped arrange the visit and walked Dylan in. “It was hard not to feel the emotion of being part of an encounter that had a real sense of history about it, with the feeling that, at every step through the Apostolic Palace, absolutely anything could happen!” he wrote.
The Vatican’s newspaper logged the guest under his birth name, saying Leo had “received in private audience Mr Robert Allen Zimmerman”. Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota.
The song the pope already quoted
This was not a random celebrity drop-in. Back in July, Leo wrote the preface to Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, a book from the Vatican Publishing House edited by Alessandro Banfi, and he reached for Dylan to make his case against nuclear rearmament. The line he chose: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled”.
It comes from “Go Away You Bomb,” a 1963 protest lyric Dylan wrote as Cold War fears peaked. He never recorded it or put it on an album, and the manuscript sat unseen until 2013. That makes it one of the deepest cuts a pope has ever pulled from a rock catalog.
Dylan and the popes: a short timeline
- 1963: Dylan writes “Go Away You Bomb,” which stays unreleased for half a century.
- 1979 to 1981: Raised Jewish, he releases Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love, three openly Christian gospel-era records.
- September 27, 1997: At the Italian National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, Dylan plays three songs, including “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” for John Paul II and about 300,000 young people, then takes off his cowboy hat, climbs to the papal stage and shakes the pope’s hand.
- 2013: The lost “Go Away You Bomb” manuscript turns up.
- July 2026: Leo XIV quotes that lyric in his disarmament preface.
- November 4, 2026: Dylan meets Leo in person, nearly three decades after Bologna.
The 1997 show produced its own famous papal riff. Addressing the crowd that day, John Paul II borrowed the opening question of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and answered it himself: “Only one. There is only one road for man, and that is the road of Jesus Christ.”
A pope who sings
Leo has made music a running theme since taking office. He has sung the Regina Caeli and the Pater Noster in Latin, and at a jubilee for choirs in November 2025 he quoted Saint Augustine: “Cantare amantis est,” singing belongs to one who loves.
Dylan, for his part, keeps his politics hard to pin down. The man behind “Masters of War” said in 2001 that he did not see himself as a pacifist.
Next stop: a phone-free night in Rome
The audience landed on the eve of a gig. Dylan plays Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport on Thursday, November 5, part of the autumn Italian leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which also takes in Milan and Bologna. Fans should leave their phones in their pockets: the tour bans smartphone recording at every show.
Further reading
Image: Pete Souza, The White House, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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