Pope Leo XIV granted Bob Dylan a private audience at the Vatican this morning (November 4), further cementing his downtown bona fides after welcoming Patti Smith in July. Dylan, the mythically private and fuss-refusing Nobel laureate, wore a black hoodie, hood up, seemingly held aloft by a black baseball cap, for the occasion, in evidence in a photo published by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication. Another photo seemingly shows Dylan signing a book for His Holiness, having removed a single glove.
Although raised Jewish, Dylan converted to evangelical Christianity in 1978. He released a string of Christian albums and peppered his live show with Christian songs—astounding legions of fans and contemporaries—but dialed down the religious fervor in subsequent years, primarily expressing his accord with God through the medium of Christmas songs. In 1997, he played at a concert honoring Pope John Paul II.
Pope Leo, for his part, appears to be quite the Dylan scholar. He quoted the little-known Dylan lyric “Go Away You Bomb”—written in 1963 for an unpublished book of anti-nuclear poetry—in the preface to Unarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, an anthology of his speeches.
