Pope Leo meets with renowned singer Bob Dylan
Pope Leo XIV met Bob Dylan at the Vatican on Nov. 4 and gave the singer a rosary; Dylan presented the pope with his autobiography. Dylan was in Rome for a concert on his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which also includes stops in Milan and Bologna. Pope Leo quoted Dylan’s anti-war song “Go Away You Bomb” in a July text criticizing the arms race. Dylan previously performed before Pope John Paul II and a large crowd of young people at a 1997 Eucharistic Congress in Bologna.
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Pope Leo XIV met with Bob Dylan at the Vatican on November 4, 2026, where they exchanged gifts. The visit came as Dylan was in Italy for a concert and followed the pope’s earlier use of Dylan’s lyrics in remarks about the arms race.
Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan presented the pope with a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. The 85-year-old singer-songwriter and Nobel laureate was in Rome ahead of a November 5 concert at the Palazzo dello Sport, part of his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour, which also includes stops in Milan and Bologna.
In July, Leo cited Dylan’s 1963 song “Go Away You Bomb” while criticizing the arms race, which the pope said “frightens and terrifies us today.” The quotation appeared in an unpublished text included in a Vatican-published anthology of Leo’s statements on peace.
Dylan had previously met a pope when he performed at the 1997 National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna before Pope John Paul II and an estimated 300,000 young people. John Paul II referred to the questions raised in Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in his address, linking its image of the wind to the Spirit and saying that Christ is the path for humanity.
Popular music’s prophetic role in Catholic peace teaching
Popular music can play a prophetic role in Catholic peace teaching—not by predicting the future or speaking with the Church’s authority, but by giving public voice to suffering, injustice, longing, and hope. Its melodies and lyrics can awaken conscience and help people imagine solidarity across divisions. But music is not peace-making by itself: Catholic teaching calls for peace rooted in human dignity, justice, fraternity, and practical efforts to resolve conflict. Nor does a prominent papal encounter with a musician amount to Church endorsement of every song or message in that artist’s work.
Pope Francis described music as having a particular capacity to reach people and unite them:
Music speaks directly to the human heart in a unique way; it possesses an extraordinary ability to create unity and to foster communion.
This helps explain why popular music can matter to peace. Songs travel beyond formal religious settings and can give shared expression to people who otherwise differ in language, background, or belief. A song can make distant suffering emotionally present, express grief that public language fails to capture, or give a community a refrain through which it recognizes a common hope. Pope Leo XIV likewise used the image of a choir: distinct voices contribute something unique to a whole, making the choir a symbol of harmony and cooperation.
That capacity is not merely aesthetic. It can help form the affections—the habits of sympathy, attention, and solidarity that make peaceful action more imaginable. A song may prompt listeners to see people marked as enemies or outsiders as fellow human beings. But emotional unity is only a beginning. It must lead toward truthful judgment and responsible action.
Catholic peace teaching is more demanding than the absence of fighting. Benedict XVI, drawing on earlier teaching, says peace requires safeguarding people’s goods, respecting the dignity of individuals and peoples, maintaining free communication, and practicing fraternity. He also stresses that peace is both a gift and a task: Christians receive peace in Christ, but must work for justice and reconciliation in concrete circumstances.
In this sense, a popular song can be prophetic when it exposes the human cost of violence or challenges indifference to injustice. It may ask listeners to notice people whom political rhetoric or public habit has rendered invisible. Its protest can call society to accountability; its lament can refuse to treat suffering as normal; its hope can resist the claim that violence is inevitable. These are prophetic functions by analogy: the song bears witness to moral truth and calls for change, but it is not thereby a prophetic revelation or an official statement of Catholic doctrine.
The Church’s peace teaching also cautions against reducing peace to good intentions. Benedict connects peace with justice and urges active concern for public and international affairs, cooperation, development, and conflict resolution. Paul VI similarly presents peace as something to be built “in truth, in justice, in love and in freedom,” while affirming that peace remains possible even amid the real causes of conflict. A song’s prophetic force is therefore strongest when it does more than express a general desire for peace: it helps listeners face the moral choices and social responsibilities peace requires.
The Church’s positive view of popular music is not an indiscriminate approval of everything popular. John Paul II welcomed the development of popular religious music, noting that it can encourage participation and express the community’s faith, while emphasizing the need for creative work that opens listeners to the text’s deeper meaning. He also recognized music’s ability to build bridges to people who are drawn to beauty but do not yet fully accept Christ.
That openness does not mean every song is Christian, truthful, or peace-promoting. Music can also glorify domination, mock human dignity, or turn anger into contempt. A Catholic assessment should ask not simply whether a song is moving or popular, but what view of the human person it communicates, whose suffering it notices, and whether it encourages truth, solidarity, and reconciliation—or instead deepens hatred and division. A forceful protest song may raise an important moral question, but its emotional intensity alone does not establish the justice of every claim or proposed remedy.
There is also a distinction between music’s cultural influence and its role in the liturgy. Popular music can contribute to public conversation, artistic dialogue, and the formation of conscience without being suitable for Mass. John Paul II’s address on music makes clear that music used in the liturgy must serve the holiness of worship; style is not the only criterion. Thus a song may have a valuable peace witness in a concert or public setting without being liturgical music.
The meeting of Pope Leo XIV with Bob Dylan provides a timely setting for considering popular music’s cultural influence. But the supplied Catholic teaching does not evaluate Dylan’s particular songs, and a papal meeting with an artist should not be treated as a declaration that the artist’s whole body of work expresses Catholic teaching. The relevant Catholic point is broader: artists can use their abilities to serve peace, hope, fraternity, and reconciliation. Francis urged musicians to become “angels of peace” by investing their artistry and lives in a culture of fraternity and reconciliation.
The prophetic role of popular music is therefore real but limited. Songs can help a society hear what it has ignored, give common form to grief and hope, and prepare people to act with greater solidarity. They cannot substitute for conversion, just institutions, dialogue, or the patient work of resolving conflict. Catholic peace teaching asks that music’s emotional power lead beyond the concert or the moment of listening: toward respect for human dignity, practical concern for others, and perseverance in seeking justice. As John Paul II put it, peace is possible—and, precisely for that reason, a duty.