Pope Leo XIV receives Bob Dylan at the Vatican and gives him a rosary

The private audience

Pope Leo XIV received Bob Dylan on Wednesday, 4 November, in a private audience inside the Apostolic Palace, according to L'Osservatore Romano, which posted a photograph of the two men shaking hands on its social media channels. Dylan, 85, whose legal name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, wore a black hooded sweatshirt, and Vatican News described the encounter as brief, limited to greetings and a few light exchanges. The pope gave the singer a rosary, while Dylan handed over a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. The audience was made possible by Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, who accompanied Dylan together with Andrea Monda, director of L'Osservatore Romano. TopNews notes that the pontiff, 71, was born in Chicago, while Dylan comes from Duluth, Minnesota.

On social media, Spadaro wrote:

“Today I accompanied Bob Dylan to meet Pope Leo, together with Andrea Monda.”

Spadaro described the visit as deeply moving, with a constant sense that anything could happen as they walked through the Apostolic Palace.

The pope's earlier citation of Dylan

In July 2026 Pope Leo XIV wrote the preface to Disarmata e disarmante. La pace è un dono, a volume published by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana and edited by journalist Alessandro Banfi. In that preface he quoted lines from "Go Away You Bomb", a protest song Dylan wrote in 1963 during the Cold War, to warn against global rearmament and nuclear weapons. The song was never officially recorded or released on an album, and its original manuscript stayed unpublished until it was found in 2013. Vatican News, cited by Europa Press, said the audience grew out of this shared interest in the song's anti-war message.

A 1997 meeting with John Paul II

Open reports that Dylan had met a pope once before, in 1997. He was invited to perform at the XXIII National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, in front of John Paul II and about 300,000 young people. After three classics, including Knockin' on Heaven's Door, he took off his cowboy hat, climbed the steps to the papal stage and shook the pope's hand, exchanging a few words. Il Messaggero says Dylan was born in Minnesota to a Jewish family and went through a phase of conversion to evangelical Christianity in the late 1970s, though he never became Catholic.

Protest songs and the Rome concert

Il Messaggero lists Masters of War, from 1963, which attacked arms makers, and Blowin' in the Wind among Dylan's songs against war. The same outlet points to Knockin' on Heaven's Door as a meditation on mortality. Dylan is in Italy on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, and Tgcom24 reports that he will perform at the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome on Thursday, 5 November. The tour also includes stops in Milan and Bologna. Open and Tgcom24 both note that the concerts ban recording with smartphones. The Rome concert falls the day after the Vatican audience, which Tgcom24 describes as short, with greetings and an exchange of jokes.