Vatican’s Culture Minister Details Bob Dylan’s Audience With Pope

Bob Dylan met the Pope on Wednesday. It wasn't the first time. Back in 1997, Dylan performed "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" in front of Pope John Paul II and about 300,000 young folks at the Eucharistic Congress in Bologna. Twenty-nine years later, he had an audience at the Vatican with Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago native who has emerged as a lover of the arts and a critic of AI while advocating for social justice at every turn.The images have been all over my social media timelines: the Pope in his white robe and skullcap, Dylan in his black hoodie (with the hood up, like he's been wearing it onstage at his shows) over top of a white dress shirt and tie. As Jokermen cohost Ian Grant put it in GQ, "Bob Dylan Dressed Like Timothée Chalamet To Meet The Pope."Today, Substack's foremost Dylanologist Ray Padgett has secured some inside information about the meetup as well as Dylan's fellow music icon Patti Smith's recent audience with Pope Leo. At his Dylan newsletter Flagging Down The Double E's, Padgett interviewed Antonio Spadaro, the man who arranged the meetings. Spadaro is a Jesuit priest who serves as undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, and he wrote his own Substack post about the Dylan/Leo summit — in Italian, naturally.Spadaro met Smith in Amsterdam a few years ago at an event by the Nexus Institute, and they stayed in touch. He said he's spoken with her extensively about Pope Leo and his predecessor, Pope Francis. "I could tell she would love to meet him, and the Pope was glad to meet her," Spadaro told Padgett. His summary of their meeting: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.Here's Smith, Spadaro, and Pope Leo together:Spadaro wouldn't say whose idea it was for Dylan to meet with the Pope, but "Dylan was interested in meeting Leo, and Leo was completely open to it." Dylan and his entourage were scheduled to arrive at 3:45 p.m. but were 15 minutes early. They had to wait until 4:20 p.m., then went up to the Pope's apartment in the palace known as the Terza Loggia. "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," Spadaro told Padgett. "The Pope and Dylan sat down at a table in the library, like two old friends." He wouldn't or couldn't say what Dylan and Leo discussed, "But the way they looked at each other was beautiful, intense."Spadaro added that there was no problem with Dylan's attire: "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." He also provided this nice summary of the Pope's history with Dylan: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.Dylan has some history with Christianity himself, though mostly not of the Catholic variety. After becoming a born-again Christian in 1978, he released a trio of religious album, 1979's Slow Train Coming, 1980's Saved, and 1981's Shot Of Love. On "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" from 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, his narrative included the lines, "I said, 'For the Pope of Eruke I was employed'/ They let me go right away/ They were very paranoid." Check out some more Dylan-meets-the-Pope pictures below.Vatican MediaVatican MediaAnd here's Dylan with Spadaro, who personally received a ticket to tonight's show in Rome from the man himself: