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Yesterday, maybe you heard, Bob Dylan met The Pope. Photos of Dylan’s Vatican summit with Pope Leo XIV took over the internet.
The man who arranged the meeting was Antonio Spadaro. He is a Jesuit priest who serves as undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See. For many years he has worked on the relationship between the Church and contemporary culture, including art, literature, film, and music: for twelve years as editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the journal linked to the Holy See, and also as a member of the Board of Directors of Georgetown University. He currently writes a Substack you can find here.
This morning, Father Spadaro took the time to answer some of my questions via email about yesterday’s historic papal summit. Earlier this year, he also set up a meeting between the Pope and another one of my favorite artists, Patti Smith, so I asked him about that too.
[Updated 7:00 PM with a few new answers from a follow-up email exchange, about “Go Away You Bomb,” “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” the signed book, the red tray, and the four-color pen]
How did you first meet Patti Smith? My understanding is you’ve been friends for a while. (I remember reading an interview you did with her in a magazine a year or so ago.)
In Amsterdam, at an event organized by the Nexus Institute. They had invited both of us to a panel discussion, and that’s where we first met. The interview you’re thinking of I did in New York; it ran in Italian in la Repubblica and then in English in Commonweal. We’ve been in conversation ever since. We get breakfast whenever I’m in New York and spend time together talking about all kinds of things.
How did the meeting between Patti Smith and the Pope come about?
The Pope knew her through her music. And Patti and I had talked at length about both Francis and Leo. I could tell she would love to meet him, and the Pope was glad to meet her. It was July 31. When she sat down across the desk from him, all she said was “Hi,” almost in a whisper, and he laughed and said “Hi” back. Anyone who knows “Wave,” the song in which Patti imagines talking with John Paul I, knows that’s exactly how it begins. From there came a conversation of about forty minutes. Two people born in Chicago discovering they were old friends, sharing words, music, dreams, and hopes.
OK, let’s get to Dylan. How long ago did this idea come up? Whose idea was it?
I’d rather keep that private. My part was, let’s say, connecting the dots… Dylan was interested in meeting Leo, and Leo was completely open to it. After all, back in July Leo XIV had quoted “Go Away You Bomb,” a 1963 text Dylan never recorded, in the preface to a book on peace.
I imagine it is no small thing to set up a meeting with the Pope. What are the steps involved? Who do you have to convince? Has this meeting been attempted before?
It’s not about convincing anyone. The Pope decides. The meeting has to make sense and the timing has to line up, which is anything but a given with a man on tour and a Pope with his own schedule, as was the case here.
As I’m sure you know, Dylan performed for Pope John Paul II in 1997. Were you there?
It was the Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, in front of some three hundred thousand young people. Dylan sang “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” took off his hat, and went up to shake the Pope’s hand. John Paul II picked up the question from “Blowin’ in the Wind” about the roads a man must walk down and answered that there is only one road: Christ. Cardinal Ratzinger later wrote that he had been skeptical about that choice. Twenty-nine years later, seeing Dylan shake hands with another Pope tells you something about how long the questions his songs asked have endured. No, I wasn’t there.
Are you a big Dylan fan yourself?
I just wrote a long piece on how L’Osservatore Romano has covered Dylan over the decades. I love poetry. Dylan is a great poet.
Can you walk me through yesterday?
I’d arranged to meet Bob at 3:45 p.m. at St. Anne’s Gate, the entrance to the Vatican. He and his people showed up at 3:30. The Vatican gendarmes escorted us to the Apostolic Palace. We were very early, so we waited about forty-five minutes, chatting with total ease alongside Andrea Monda, editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano, and Carlo Feltrinelli, Dylan’s publisher. Both are huge Dylan fans. Then at 4:20 we went up to the Third Loggia, to the Pope’s apartment. I felt the thrill of living through a meeting that had the taste of history, with the sense that anything could happen at every step. The Pope and Dylan sat down at a table in the library, like two old friends.
Do you know what they talked about?
What two people say to each other at a table stays between them. I understood that Bob wanted to talk with Leo one-on-one. But the way they looked at each other was beautiful, intense.
I saw he signed a book for you! What book was that?
Yes! An anthology of his songs. I asked him to. He smiled. I handed him a little four-color pen I had on me, and he inscribed it to me. It’s a treasured keepsake.
Which anthology of songs did he sign? Is it an Italian one?
It’s a bilingual anthology, English with Italian translation, titled 64 Lyrics, published by Crocetti and edited by Alessandro Carrera and Carlo Feltrinelli.
It’s funny you mention the four-color pen. I saw a couple people commenting on that yesterday. Are you a regular user of that sort of pen? Did Dylan get to pick his own color?
Yes, I love those four-color pens, and I often carry one with me. Actually, I picked the color myself: black.
Dylan wears the black hood up all the time now. Was that an issue? Is there a dress code?
Dylan came dressed in black, with a tie, gloves, and the hood up over his head: that’s how he appears in public, onstage on this tour too. It’s his way of being himself right now. I know that for a fact. And in front of the Pope he wanted to feel like himself. In 1997 he came before John Paul II in a cowboy hat, and took it off to greet him. The photos from Wednesday show a smiling Pope. He took Bob’s outfit completely in stride. My impression was that, for Leo, the way Bob was dressed was entirely natural. No surprise at all. Besides, it was a private audience, not a formal one. No advance notice had been given.
What is that red box on the tray when they’re talking? I noticed it on the table in the Patti meeting too.
A rosary.
Is the Pope a Bob Dylan fan, do you know? What sort of music does he like?
Dylan is part of Leo’s generation soundtrack. He has quoted him more than once. In April, in Cameroon, he echoed the themes of “Masters of War.” In July he used the lines of “Go Away You Bomb” to speak out against nuclear rearmament. Leo XIV is an Augustinian, and in 1967, on John Wesley Harding, Dylan dreamed he saw that very saint. The Pope was born in Chicago in 1955 and was a teenager at the turn of the sixties and seventies. The American pop, folk, and rock of that era has been part of his cultural makeup since he was young. But it was Jim Musselman, Prevost’s classmate at Villanova University and a Bob Dylan admirer, who revealed that the two of them talked about music a lot. He was the one who told him to read an essay arguing that Dylan was the great poetic talent of his generation.
“Go Away You Bomb” is a very deep reference. I’d never even heard of that Dylan composition until yesterday. Any idea how the Pope became aware of it?
He quoted it himself, in July, in the introduction to Disarmata e disarmante, a book collecting his words on peace, published by the Vatican publishing house. Dylan’s song is in a footnote, alongside Dorothy Day, Giorgio La Pira, and Stanislav Petrov. How it first reached him, I honestly don’t know. The lyrics have been public since 2014, when the typescript went up for auction at Christie’s. What I do know is that Dylan has been part of his world for a long time.
You mentioned “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” I just saw mentioned elsewhere that the Pope himself referenced that song to Dylan when they met. What did he say, and what was Dylan’s reaction? (That’s a personal favorite song of mine.)
I think there’s a small mix-up there. The song Leo quoted in a text he wrote was “Go Away You Bomb.” The link to “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” is mine. Writing about the meeting, I couldn’t help thinking that Dylan once dreamed of the saint whose son this Pope declared himself to be from the loggia of St. Peter’s. It’s a beautiful song, and a hard one: the dreamer wakes up and discovers he was part of the crowd that put Augustine to death. As for anything else said at that table, it stays between the two of them. I’m glad it’s a favorite of yours. It’s one of mine too.
Finally, are you going to Dylan’s show in Rome tonight?
Of course! I received the ticket from him.
Thank you Father Spadaro—and enjoy the concert! Follow him on Substack here.
Thank you for this interview, which allowed me to share my immediate impressions of this event, of which I was a direct eyewitness!
Fantasmic, Ray. Great job landing the interview and enlightening the moment.