Originally published at The Crux
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ROME — Bob Dylan came knockin’ on Pope Leo XIV’ s door Wednesday, as the American singer-songwriter and poet visited with the American pope at the Vatican during a break between concert dates in Italy.
The Vatican said the encounter was brief, with Leo giving Dylan a rosary and Dylan presenting the pope with a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.”
Leo had quoted from an unpublished protest song Dylan penned in 1963, “Go Away You Bomb,” in his 2026 book “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift.”
Leo was warning against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons and quoted the lyric, addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.”
Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan: the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied Patti Smith to a July audience with Leo; and Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
Spadaro said Dylan had wanted to speak with Leo, and the two met in private for a few minutes. In an essay in L’Osservatore Romano, he recalled that the former Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago in 1955, grew up
