5.11.2026
Pope Leo XIV received Nobel Prize-winning US singer-songwriter Bob Dylan at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace during the Rome stop of the musician’s Italian tour, Vatican News reported.
The brief private audience included greetings, a conversation and an exchange of gifts, according to the Vatican’s official news outlet.
Leo presented Dylan with a rosary, while the 85-year-old musician gave the pontiff a signed copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.
Photographs released by Vatican Media showed the Chicago-born pope, dressed in his customary white cassock, shaking hands with Dylan, who wore a black hooded sweatshirt, coat and gloves.
Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the US state of Minnesota, was in Rome for a scheduled Thursday performance at the Palazzo dello Sport.
The concert is part of the autumn European leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which also includes stops in Milan and Bologna.
Leo had previously drawn on Dylan’s work in his writings.
In July, the pope quoted a line from Dylan’s 1963 anti-nuclear piece Go Away You Bomb in the preface to Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, a book published by the Vatican Publishing House.
“I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled,” Leo quoted while warning against global rearmament and the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
Dylan wrote the piece at the height of the Cold War, but it was never officially recorded or included on an album. Its typewritten manuscript remained unpublished until it was discovered in 2013.
Wednesday’s audience marked Dylan’s second meeting with a pope.
In 1997, he performed before Pope John Paul II and around 300,000 young people attending the 23rd National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna.
Dylan performed several songs, including Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, before greeting John Paul II onstage. AA
Bob Dylan and Pope Leo...meet and greet.