SAINT PAUL, MN — One of Minnesota's most famous sons got a private audience with the leader of the Catholic Church on Wednesday, when Pope Leo XIV welcomed Bob Dylan to the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican.
The 85-year-old singer-songwriter, who was born in Duluth and raised in Hibbing, is in Italy on the autumn leg of his "Rough and Rowdy Ways" tour.
The meeting was brief, according to Vatican News, and consisted of "greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges." Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, "Chronicles: Volume One."
Photos released by the Vatican show the two shaking hands, with Dylan in a black coat, black gloves and a black hooded sweatshirt and the pope in his white cassock.
The Vatican's newspaper said Leo had "received in private audience Mr. Robert Allen Zimmerman," using Dylan's birth name.
The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican official and Jesuit known for building relationships with people in the entertainment industry, said on Instagram that he helped arrange the visit.
The meeting came about four months after the pope, a 71-year-old Chicago native born Robert Prevost, quoted Dylan in the preface to a Vatican-published book on disarmament, "Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift."
The line comes from "Go Away You Bomb," a protest song Dylan wrote in 1963 at the height of Cold War tensions. The song was never officially recorded or released, and its manuscript remained unpublished until it was discovered in 2013, according to Vatican News.
Dylan is scheduled to perform Thursday at the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome. The tour, which also includes stops in Milan and Bologna, strictly prohibits recording on smartphones.
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