A photo opportunity, followed by a short but warm exchange and gifts were also exchanged: music legend Bob Dylan made a surprise visit to Pope Leo XIV in the Vatican.
With a black hood on his head and an umbrella in his hand, the 85-year-old US singer met the pontiff (71) in the Apostolic Palace. The news portal “Vatican News” first reported. Several official photos show the unusual encounter. They then spread like wildfire on the Internet.
Dylan's outfit in particular caused a lot of conversation on social media. In the photos of the meeting he can be seen dressed entirely in black, even his hands were in black leather gloves. The artist's hood, which was pulled low over his face and under which Dylan was apparently hiding a baseball cap, was particularly controversial. A number of internet users rated the outfit as disrespectful, others as cool. At
Pope recently quoted Dylan in the foreword to a book
Dylan – whose real name is Robert Allen Zimmerman – performed in Rome with his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” concert tour. What the musician and the Pope discussed is not known. According to Vatican News, Leo presented the singer with a rosary, while Dylan gave the head of the Catholic Church a copy of his autobiography.
Just this July, Leo quoted lines from Dylan's anti-war poem "Go Away You Bomb" in the foreword to a book about war and peace. The work was written in 1963 during the Cold War and was unpublished for a long time. Leo used the lines to warn against the arms race and the resort to nuclear weapons; He quoted a line directed at a hypothetical atomic bomb: “I hate you because you are made by humans, owned by humans and handled by humans.”
Dylan was accompanied at his private audience by two Vatican officials: Father Antonio Spadaro, an employee of the Vatican Ministry of Culture - who had previously accompanied Patti Smith at an audience with Leo in July - and Andrea Monda, editor-in-chief of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
Dylan has already met a pope once
Spadaro later revealed that Dylan himself had expressed a desire to speak to Leo. In an article for “L’Osservatore Romano,” Spadaro also recalled that Robert Prevost (Leo), born in Chicago in 1955, grew up with Dylan’s music. He also noted that Dylan is very familiar with St. Augustine of Hippo - who serves as a source of inspiration for Leo's spirituality and the Augustinian Order; For example, Dylan wrote the song “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for the 1967 album “John Wesley Harding”. At the beginning of the meeting, the Pope even jokingly introduced himself to Dylan as “Son of St. Augustine,” says X, referring to Spadaro.
The singer, who comes from a Jewish family in the US state of Minnesota, had his first encounter with a pope almost 30 years ago. In 1997 he appeared at a youth meeting in Bologna in the presence of Pope John Paul II and sang, among other things, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”.
At the end of the 1970s, Dylan temporarily turned to Christianity and released the albums “Slow Train Coming” (1979), “Saved” (1980) and “Shot of Love” (1981), which are considered a gospel trilogy. In an interview, the 85-year-old described himself as a generally religious and spiritual person: "I am a religious person. I read a lot of the Holy Scriptures, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and redemption as well as in predestination. The five books of Moses, the letters of Paul, the invocation of the saints - all of that."
