Bob Dylan went to the Vatican on Wednesday dressed exactly as Bob Dylan dresses: black hoodie up, black gloves, an umbrella in his hand. Pope Leo XIV received the 85-year-old singer in a private audience at the Apostolic Palace, and the Vatican released photographs of the two men standing side by side — the pope in his white cassock, Dylan in the hoodie. Vatican News described the encounter as brief, made up of greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.
Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, is the most decorated songwriter in American music: the voice of “Blowin' in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Knockin' on Heaven's Door,” and the first musician ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2016. The Vatican's own newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, recorded the visit formally: the pope “received in private audience Mr. Robert Allen Zimmerman,” and thanked Father Antonio Spadaro, the Vatican culture official who helped arrange the meeting, for making it possible.
The two men exchanged gifts. The pope gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. Father Spadaro, who accompanied Dylan alongside L'Osservatore Romano editor Andrea Monda, said Dylan had wanted to speak with the pope, and the two spent a few minutes alone together.
There is a real connection behind the audience. Leo, 71, the Chicago-born first American pope, is a known Dylan fan: in his 2026 book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, published in July, he quoted “Go Away You Bomb,” an unpublished anti-nuclear protest song Dylan wrote in 1963, in a passage warning against a new arms race. Dylan was in Italy between concert dates on his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour — he played Milan on Monday and was due to play Rome on Thursday — and Leo has made a habit of receiving American musicians, having hosted Patti Smith for a long private audience in the summer.
For American readers, the picture is the story: the first pope from the United States, a Chicagoan, welcoming the defining songwriter of American music, a Minnesotan, into the Apostolic Palace — two Midwesterners in their seventies and eighties meeting over a rosary, a memoir and a 63-year-old protest song about peace that the pope chose to put in his book.
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