What do you bring a pope? Bob Dylan brought his memoir and left with a rosary
Pope Leo XIV received Bob Dylan at the Apostolic Palace on Wednesday afternoon for a short audience. The 85-year-old is in Rome on tour and plays the Palazzo dello Sport on Thursday. In July the Pope had quoted one of his songs against the bomb.
Bob Dylan went to the Vatican on Wednesday afternoon and came away with a rosary from Pope Leo XIV. In return he left a copy of “Chronicles: Volume One”, the memoir he published in 2004. Vatican News confirmed the meeting and called it brief, with greetings and a few light-hearted exchanges.
Dylan turned up at the Apostolic Palace looking the way he looks almost everywhere: in black, with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up. He was accompanied by the Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro, who described the encounter on social media.
A song against the bomb
The visit did not come out of nowhere. In July, Leo XIV quoted “Go Away You Bomb” in the preface to a book on disarmament from the Vatican’s publishing house. Dylan wrote the protest song in 1963 and never officially recorded it. The manuscript only surfaced in 2013.
That does not make Dylan a card-carrying pacifist. In 2001 he said he did not consider himself one and defended the right to self-defence.
Not his first pope
In 1997 he played in Bologna in front of John Paul II at the National Eucharistic Congress, with around 300,000 young people in the crowd. He sang three songs and went to greet the Pope on stage, and John Paul II went on to quote one of his best-known lyrics in his address.
Dylan’s faith has come in phases. He grew up in a Jewish family, moved towards Christianity at the end of the 1970s and made three openly religious records starting with “Slow Train Coming” in 1979. In a recent interview he said he is religious, reads Scripture and prays.
Tonight, in Rome
At 85, the 2016 Nobel laureate in literature is in Italy with his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour and plays Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport on Thursday night, with Milan and Bologna to follow. As on every date of the tour, filming on your phone is not allowed.
In a week when books were already in the news with the Goncourt going to Philippe Jaenada, a Nobel winner has handed his memoir to a pope.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Hwn2013 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
