Leo’s book connected Dylan’s protest song to nuclear disarmament

Pope Leo XIV met Bob Dylan at the Vatican on Wednesday during a break between the American singer-songwriter’s concert dates in Italy. The Vatican said the private audience was brief. Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan presented Leo with a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.”

The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied Patti Smith to a July audience with Leo, and Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, accompanied Dylan. Spadaro said Dylan wanted to speak with Leo and that the two met in private for a few minutes.

Leo’s 2026 book, “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift,” quoted an unpublished protest song Dylan penned in 1963, “Go Away You Bomb.” Leo used the song while warning against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons. The lyric, addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb, read: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.”

In an essay in L’Osservatore Romano, Spadaro recalled that Leo, born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955, grew up familiar with Dylan’s music. Spadaro also noted Dylan’s familiarity with St. Augustine of Hippo, whom the essay identified as an inspiration for Leo’s spirituality and Augustinian religious order. Dylan wrote “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for his 1967 album John Wesley Harding.

Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, wore a black hoodie and a loose tie. Vatican photographs of the audience showed him with the hood over his head.

The meeting was not Dylan’s first papal encounter. In 1997, he performed for Pope John Paul II and thousands of other people in Bologna, Italy, during a concert that capped a religious congress.

Dylan, who changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, was born to a Jewish family in Minnesota. He became a born-again Christian in 1979, and songs such as “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved” alienated some of his longtime fans. In more recent years, he had been more circumspect about his religious beliefs.

In a 2022 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dylan said he was a “religious person” who read the scriptures, meditated and prayed.

Dylan played in Milan on Monday and was scheduled to perform in Rome on Thursday. In his most recent concert before meeting Leo, Dylan sang his 1997 song “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” which includes the lyric: “I’ve been all around the world, boys/Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door.”