“You know, it ain’t even safe no more/ in the palace of the pope.” Bob Dylan seems to have disregarded this warning from his 1983 song “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” if press reports out of the Vatican are any indication. And there are photos to prove it: Bob Dylan in the Vatican, shaking hands and sitting down for a chat with Pope Leo XIV.
As photos go, these shots of two Bobs from the Midwest were a bit of a surprise: Was Pope Leo XIV being asked by a teenager outside a 7-11 to buy some beers for him and his buddies? Or had Emperor Palpatine arrived to tell the pope, “Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side”? There might be strict protocols for what one wears to see the pope, but the only one Bob Dylan seems to have heeded is that his head is covered. Yes, he’s wearing a hoodie.
But wouldn’t you kind of expect it? That Dylan would show up as Napoleon in rags?
The 85-year-old singer (and winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature) is in town to perform at Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport as part of his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour (Dylan has essentially been on tour since 1988). According to Vatican News, Pope Leo gave Dylan a rosary at their meeting, while Dylan gave the pope an autographed copy of his idiosyncratic 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.
Antonio Spadaro, S.J., the undersecretary for the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, wrote on Facebook after the meeting: “It was hard not to feel the emotion of being part of an encounter that had a real sense of history about it, with the feeling that, at every step through the Apostolic Palace, absolutely anything could happen!”
Real Dylan heads have had reason to suspect that Pope Leo XIV was a true believer already, given that earlier this year, he dug deep into Dylan’s back pages for a quote from an unrecorded 1963 song, “Go Away You Bomb,” for the foreword to a new book of the pope’s writings on peacemaking. The lyric in question? “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled.”
What Bob Dylan thinks of the pope is anyone’s guess, though the notoriously reclusive singer isn’t much for impromptu public appearances.
Leo isn’t the first pope Dylan has met, actually. At the International Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, Italy, in 1997, Dylan performed three songs for Pope John Paul II and 30,000 young people: “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” “Forever Young” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Two decades later, Pope Benedict XVI confessed in a 2007 book, John Paul II: My Beloved Predecessor, that he was not a fan of the singer or the performance. Dylan and the other performers, he remembered, “had a message completely different from that to which the Pope was committed. There was reason to be sceptical—which I was, and in a certain sense still am—to doubt whether it was really right to involve ‘prophets’ of this type.”
Pope John Paul II was more amenable at the time, using some of the lyrics from Dylan’s 1963 hit “Blowin’ in the Wind” in his remarks. “There is only one road for man, and it is the road of Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I am the Way and the Life,’” said the pope. Oh, and the answer, my friend? It can be found not “in the wind that blows everything away into nothingness, but in the wind that is the breath and voice of the Spirit, the voice that calls and says, ‘Come.’”
Pope Leo XIV has shown a willingness to engage with popular culture already, meeting Andrea Bocelli in June of this year and rocker Patti Smith in July. Remarking on the latter meeting, Father Spadaro said it “felt more like a conversation between two people discovering they were old friends, sharing memories woven from words and music, dreams, visions, and hopes—both from yesterday and for today.”
One can imagine Pope Leo and Bob Dylan doing the same. But there’s another link between the two that might become clearer when Pope Leo’s visit to Peru, Uruguay and Argentina begins on Nov. 6. Both Dylan and Leo have been vocal critics of the economic exploitation that all too often accompanies globalization, Dylan in his lyrics and Pope Leo most recently in his encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas.” On his 11-day trip, Pope Leo will be returning to the Peruvian towns where he worked for many years as a missionary. He may have had them in mind when he wrote this:
In our global economic system, countries do not enjoy the same freedom to develop on their own terms. Due to factors like centuries of colonialism, unfair trade agreements, and, in many cases, unpayable national debts, the economies of many countries in the Global South are made subordinate to the needs and desires of economies in the Global North. To satisfy consumer demands in the Global North, people work in harsh, even fatal, conditions. True development would mean people being free to imagine and build the kinds of societies they want, without the pressures of international profit-seeking.
Sixty-three years ago, Dylan released his haunting tale of the decline of an American mining town in the second half of the 20th century. Likely writing of his own hometown of Hibbing, Minn. (home of one of the world’s largest open-pit iron mines), Dylan sang in “North Country Blues” of the loss of jobs due to globalization and the cynical decisions of multinational corporations:
They complained in the East
That they’re paying too high
They say that your ore ain’t worth digging
That it’s much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing.
Bob, meet Bob. I’m sure you had a lot to talk about.
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