Bob Dylan met privately with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, during the Italian section of his European tour. Official photographs show the 85-year-old musician wearing a black hood beside the Pontiff. The visit recalls his 1997 encounter with John Paul II and follows Leo’s recent use of Dylan’s writing in a preface discussing peace and nuclear disarmament.
Bob Dylan arrived at the Vatican in black clothing, his hood pulled over his head, for a private meeting with Pope Leo XIV. Photographs show the two shaking hands and standing beside one another. The visit took place on the afternoon of November 4, between the American songwriter’s concert commitments in Italy.
The Vatican formally announced that the Pope had received Robert Allen Zimmerman, the musician’s birth name, in a private audience. Vatican Media released the photographs. They offered a rare view of Dylan away from the concert setting in which he is currently appearing, documenting the encounter without providing an extensive account of what was said.
The information released described a brief, cordial meeting, with greetings and lighthearted exchanges. No detailed list of discussion topics or agreements accompanied it. Bob Dylan has not issued a public statement explaining the conversation or setting out his personal views on subjects that may have arisen during the audience.
Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro helped arrange the encounter and received public thanks from the Vatican’s newspaper. His work has long explored the relationship between faith and culture. He also wrote about earlier connections between the songwriter and the Catholic Church, placing the visit within a history extending beyond this single afternoon.
Dylan is in Italy as part of his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” touring activity, with appearances in Milan and Rome providing the immediate setting for the Vatican visit. At 85, he continues performing for audiences after more than six decades of concert work. The audience with the Pope occurred within that professional itinerary.
For Bob Dylan, meeting a Pontiff is not a first. On September 27, 1997, he performed in Bologna at Italy’s 23rd National Eucharistic Congress, before John Paul II and an audience of approximately 300,000 young people. That event remains the clearest earlier public point of contact between his concert career and a Pope.
His programme that night included “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Forever Young”. Afterwards, he approached the papal stage, removed his cowboy hat and greeted John Paul II. Their handshake became one of the familiar images of the event, connecting the musical performance with a brief personal encounter.
John Paul II also drew on “Blowin’ in the Wind” when addressing the young audience. Taking the song’s question about how many roads a person must travel as his starting point, he offered a theological response. His interpretation was a public use of Dylan’s writing, not evidence that the songwriter endorsed every religious statement within the address.
The link with Leo XIV is more recent. In July 2026, the Pope used words by Bob Dylan in the preface to a book about peace and disarmament published by the Vatican Publishing House. The passage came from “Go Away You Bomb”, an early piece directed against nuclear weapons rather than one of the songs most often heard in his live catalogue.
Dylan wrote that work in 1963 for a collection of anti-atomic-bomb songs planned by Izzy Young, who ran the Folklore Center in New York’s Greenwich Village. The proposed book did not appear, and Dylan did not record the song. Its words nevertheless survived, allowing the piece to be read long after the project for which it was intended had failed to reach publication.
In the preface to “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift”, Leo used the writing to discuss the threat of nuclear weapons. That establishes familiarity with this part of Bob Dylan’s work before the November audience. It does not establish that the two discussed nuclear disarmament during the meeting, whose detailed content has not been publicly described.
Biblical figures and religious imagery have appeared across different periods of Dylan’s recordings. “Slow Train Coming”, “Saved” and “Shot of Love”, released around the turn of the 1980s, form a particularly explicit Christian period in his catalogue. That artistic history cannot, on its own, determine his present personal beliefs or explain the purpose of every later meeting.
The visit also comes during a year of continuing live work. “Rough and Rowdy Ways”, released in 2020, remains a reference point for the current tour, alongside selections from earlier recordings. The Vatican stop was not accompanied by an announcement of a new musical collaboration or a separate artistic project involving the Pope.
After Italy, the announced itinerary continues through other European cities and the United Kingdom, including London’s Royal Festival Hall in December. Those engagements provide the immediate professional context for Bob Dylan’s presence in Rome. They do not supply an account of the private audience, which remains documented principally through the announcement and official images.
Reports of gifts exchanged have appeared internationally, but the initial official information did not provide sufficient detail to confirm those accounts unreservedly. What is established is the meeting itself. Twenty-nine years after removing his cowboy hat to greet John Paul II in Bologna, Dylan was photographed beside another Pope, this time wearing a black hood in the Vatican.
IMAGE_CREDIT: Vatican Media
