QUICK TAKE | Two Popes, Two Bob Dylan Songs. Seven Things to Know About His Vatican Visit

1. What brought Bob Dylan to the Vatican?

Dylan was in Rome on the Italian leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour when Pope Leo XIV received him at the Apostolic Palace on November 4. The 85-year-old singer-songwriter was due to play the Palazzo dello Sport the following evening. Vatican News described the encounter as brief and lighthearted.

2. What did they give each other?

Leo gave Dylan a rosary. Dylan brought the pope a copy of Chronicles: Volume One, his 2004 memoir. The Vatican photographs caught the unlikely pairing: the Nobel laureate with his black hood still up, shaking hands with the pope in white.

3. Which Dylan song had Leo already quoted?

“Go Away You Bomb”, a protest song Dylan wrote in 1963. Leo quoted it in July in his preface to Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. Dylan addresses the atomic bomb directly, dwelling on the fact that people made it, own it and handle it. Leo used the lyric to warn against global rearmament.

4. Why might even Dylan fans struggle to place it?

The song was never officially recorded or released on an album. Its manuscript surfaced in 2013, half a century after Dylan wrote it. Leo had reached past the familiar protest anthems for a song that had spent decades on paper.

5. When did Dylan meet his first pope?

In 1997, at the National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna. Dylan played before John Paul II and a crowd of roughly 300,000 young people. His set included “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”. He took off his cowboy hat, climbed the steps to the papal stage and shook John Paul’s hand.

6. How did John Paul II answer Dylan?

He took the question from “Blowin’ in the Wind” about how many roads a person must walk and supplied his own answer: “Only one.” He told the crowd that the road was Jesus Christ.

7. Did Dylan play “Blowin’ in the Wind” that night?

No. The song entered the evening through John Paul’s address. The pope chose it for what he wanted to say to the young people gathered in Bologna. Nearly three decades later, Leo made his own selection from Dylan’s songbook, this time to talk about nuclear weapons.