Making Creator Headlines · Page 6
Dylan Visits the Pope, and Both Leave With a Better Gift Than a Playlist Link
· New York time
Bob Dylan visited Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican during a break between concert dates in Italy. The Vatican described the meeting between the American songwriter and the American pope as brief. Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan presented the pope with his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.” The encounter also had a literary connection. In his 2026 book, Leo quoted from “Go Away You Bomb,” an unpublished protest song Dylan wrote in 1963. That detail links the meeting to work from more than six decades earlier, even though the two men met in a very different setting from the one in which the song was written. Celebrity visits to the Vatican tend to produce a formal photograph and a careful record of the gifts. This one supplied a particularly compact exchange: a memoir in one direction, a rosary in the other. Neither object requires a press conference to explain why its giver might have chosen it. Dylan’s songs have traveled well beyond concert halls, and the pope’s quotation offers one example of that reach. The meeting itself was short, but the bibliography was generous. Somewhere between the tour schedule and the Vatican calendar, two Americans found time to trade objects with considerably longer shelf lives than the visit.
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