Bob Dylan has met his second pope. On Wednesday afternoon, November 4, Pope Leo XIV received the 85-year-old Nobel laureate in a private audience at the Apostolic Palace, and Dylan turned up exactly as fans would expect: dressed head to toe in black, with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his head.
Vatican News described the meeting as brief, made up of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.” Gifts changed hands. Dylan gave the Pope a copy of Chronicles: Volume One, the 2004 memoir that has still never had a second volume. The Pope gave Dylan a rosary. The official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, recorded the visit in its own formal way, saying the Pope had “received in private audience Mr. Robert Allen Zimmerman,” according to CNN, which used Dylan’s birth name.
How the meeting came about
The audience didn’t come out of nowhere. In July, Pope Leo quoted Dylan in print, in the preface to Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, a collection of his addresses and reflections published by the Vatican’s own publishing house. The song he picked was a deep cut even by Dylan standards. “Go Away You Bomb” is an anti-nuclear protest song written in 1963 that was never officially released, and its manuscript only came to light in 2013. Euronews reports that the Pope used the lyric to warn against rearmament and nuclear escalation. CNN notes he has also criticized the war in Iran and stressed the Church’s opposition to nuclear weapons.
The person who set up the meeting was Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican official known for building bridges between the Church and the wider culture. He’s done this before: earlier this year Spadaro arranged Pope Leo’s meeting with Patti Smith. He was with Dylan on Wednesday, along with Andrea Monda, editor of L’Osservatore Romano. “Today I accompanied Bob Dylan to see Pope Leo,” Spadaro posted afterwards. CNN quotes him going further: “It was hard not to feel the emotion of being part of an encounter that had a real sense of history about it.”
CNN also pointed out the obvious coincidence. These are two of the most famous Bobs the American Midwest has ever produced. Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota. The Pope, born Robert Prevost, is 71 and from Chicago.
The hoodie
The pictures released by Vatican Media show the contrast plainly: the Pope in his white cassock, Dylan beside him in a black zip-up hoodie with the hood up, a polka-dot scarf at his neck. CNN adds that he also wore a black coat and black gloves. Consequence called it his “finest black hoodie.”
For anyone who has followed Dylan’s last decade of touring, none of this is surprising. He rarely gives interviews, almost never poses for pictures, and his current shows ban phones outright. Turning up to the Apostolic Palace dressed the way he’d dress for a soundcheck is about as Dylan as it gets. Whether that reads as disrespect or as a man who simply doesn’t change for anybody is the kind of argument his fans have been having for sixty years.
Dylan and the papacy, round two
This is not Dylan’s first brush with a pope. In September 1997 he played the National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna in front of Pope John Paul II and around 300,000 young people. Accounts agree on three songs. CNN lists them as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” He then stepped down from the stage and shook the Pope’s hand.
John Paul II answered him in his address, picking up the famous question from “Blowin’ in the Wind” about how many roads a man must walk down. The wording varies a little between translations. Vatican News renders the Pope’s reply as “Only one. There is only one road for man, and that is the road of Jesus Christ.” CNN quotes it as “There is only one road of man and it is Christ, who said: ‘I am the way’.”
Faith has run through Dylan’s career in ways that still divide his audience. Raised in a Jewish family in Minnesota, he turned to Christianity at the end of the 1970s and released three openly gospel albums in a row: Slow Train Coming in 1979, then Saved and Shot of Love. Outlets differ on how to date that period. Euronews places the turn in the late 1970s, while ClutchPoints, in a piece syndicated by Yahoo, calls it his religious period of the 1980s. Both are partly right, since the run spanned 1979 to 1981. Euronews also notes that Dylan has said in later interviews that he is religious, reads Scripture, meditates and prays. It adds a twist that fits the peace theme of the Pope’s preface uneasily: in 2001, Dylan said he did not consider himself a pacifist and defended the right to self-defense.
What happens next
Dylan was in Rome on a working trip. He is in the middle of a European run that has already taken in Milan, and Vatican News reports that he plays the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome on Thursday, November 5, with Bologna also on the itinerary. According to ClutchPoints, the run is billed as the Lights of Autumn Tour, plays Bologna on November 7, continues into Slovenia, and wraps with five nights at London’s Royal Festival Hall from December 3 to 8. Those later dates come from that one report.
Will the Pope be in the crowd in Rome? Nobody has said. ClutchPoints notes that it’s unknown whether he’ll attend any of the Italian shows. Given that the Vatican described Wednesday as brief and lighthearted, the more likely outcome is that this is the whole story: two Bobs from the Midwest, a book, a rosary, and a hoodie that will be talked about longer than anything either of them said.
