VATICAN CITY (Diya TV) — Pope Leo XIV met Bob Dylan at the Apostolic Palace on Wednesday, Nov. 4, in a brief private audience shaped by a connection made months earlier: Leo had cited Dylan’s little-known anti-nuclear song in a book calling for disarmament.
The Vatican said the two exchanged greetings and a few lighthearted remarks. Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and the singer gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. Vatican officials did not release details of their conversation. Father Antonio Spadaro, who accompanied Dylan with Vatican newspaper editor Andrea Monda, said Dylan had wanted to meet the pope.
Dylan, 85, was in Rome for a concert Thursday at Palazzo dello Sport, part of the Italian leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. The itinerary also included stops in Milan and Bologna. Vatican photographs showed Dylan wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, coat and gloves as he shook hands with Leo.
In July, Leo quoted Dylan’s 1963 composition “Go Away You Bomb” in the preface to Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. The Vatican Publishing House published the book, an anthology of Leo’s remarks on peace since his election in May 2025. In the preface, Leo warned that global rearmament and cyber dominance raise serious questions about humanity’s future. He used Dylan’s words, written as an address to the atomic bomb, to underline that people created and control these weapons.
Dylan never officially recorded “Go Away You Bomb” or released it on an album. The song’s original manuscript remained unpublished until someone discovered it in 2013. He wrote it during the Cold War, when the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union heightened fears of a global conflict.
The meeting also brought together two figures with a connection to St. Augustine. Leo belongs to the Augustinian order, and Dylan wrote “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Vatican reporting noted that Leo grew up familiar with Dylan’s music.
Dylan’s latest Vatican visit followed an earlier encounter with a pope. In 1997, he performed at a religious congress in Bologna before Pope John Paul II and a large gathering of young people. John Paul later drew on Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in an address, using the song’s question about the path to manhood to introduce a message about Christian faith. 3
Dylan received the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for creating new poetic expressions within the American song tradition. His meeting with Leo placed one of his lesser-known protest compositions at the center of a Vatican conversation about nuclear arms and peace.
