Dylan Comes Knockin at the Pope’s Door as Leo Welcomes a Legend to the Vatican

A private meeting at Vatican

Dylan visited Leo at the Vatican on Wednesday while traveling between Italian concerts. The meeting lasted a few minutes and took place in private, according to Vatican official the Rev. Antonio Spadaro.

Spadaro and Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, accompanied Dylan. Spadaro wrote that Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, had grown up familiar with Dylan’s music in Chicago, where he was born in 1955.

Music and a message for peace

Leo quoted from Dylan’s unpublished 1963 protest song “Go Away You Bomb” in his 2026 book, “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift.” The pope warned against an arms race and the use of nuclear weapons, citing a lyric directed at an imagined atomic bomb. The Vatican said Leo gave Dylan a rosary. Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.”

Dylan’s faith and Italian tour

Dylan, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, wore a black hoodie and loose tie; Vatican photographs showed the hood over his head. Born Robert Zimmerman to a Jewish family in Minnesota, he became a born-again Christian in 1979, a change that alienated some longtime fans.

In a 2022 Wall Street Journal interview, Dylan described himself as religious and said he reads scripture, meditates and prays. He played in Milan on Monday and was scheduled to perform in Rome on Thursday; before meeting Leo, he sang “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” his 1997 song.