Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo at the Vatican

The private meeting in the Apostolic Palace brought together two Americans whose birth names are Robert Prevost and Robert Zimmerman. The Vatican described the audience as brief. Dylan was in Italy between performances, having played in Milan on November 2 and scheduled to appear in Rome on November 5.

Leo gave Dylan a rosary, while Dylan presented the pope with a copy of his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. Vatican officials Antonio Spadaro and Andrea Monda accompanied the musician. According to Spadaro, Dylan had hoped to talk to Leo.

The pope has previously drawn on Dylan’s work in discussing peace and nuclear weapons. In a book published in 2026, Leo cited words from Dylan’s unpublished 1963 anti-nuclear song, “Go Away You Bomb,” as he warned against rearmament and the use of nuclear arms.

Spadaro noted that Leo had grown up knowing Dylan’s music and that Dylan wrote “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” a song inspired by the early Christian thinker associated with Leo’s religious order.

The meeting was not Dylan’s first with a pope. In 1997, he performed at a religious gathering in Bologna attended by Pope John Paul II, playing songs including “Blowin’ in the Wind.”