Bob Dylan met Pope Leo XIV in a private audience at the Vatican on Wednesday, November 4. The Holy See announced the meeting by posting a photograph on Instagram of the two men shaking hands: the pope in his white robes, smiling; Dylan in a black hooded zip-up under a jacket, looking at him steadily. Further images show them seated at a table in conversation, standing before a piece of artwork, and talking while Dylan leans on an umbrella.
Vatican News described the encounter as brief, made up of greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges. Gifts were exchanged: the pope gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan gave him a copy of Chronicles: Volume One, the first installment of his memoirs, published in 2004.
The timing is part of the story. Dylan plays the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome the following day, the latest stop on his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, so the audience sits a short walk from a concert he was already due to give. Leo XIV, who took office in May last year after the death of Pope Francis, is the first American-born pope, and the meeting brought two Midwesterners together in a room built for ceremony.
Dylan's relationship with religious material has run through his catalog since the gospel records of the late 1970s, and a private audience is a different kind of stage: no amplification, no setlist, a handshake and a rosary. ROMBO has followed the Dylan story through his archival releases and his rotating bands, most recently the announcement of The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings. The Vatican photographs belong to that same long record of a performer who keeps appearing in rooms where the frame around him is larger than the song.
What the images hold is the hoodie. In a setting of marble and protocol, Dylan dressed as he does on any given Tuesday, and the picture reads as a man arriving as himself. The pope, in white, meets him there. The rosary and the memoir passed between them make an odd, fitting pair: an object of devotion for an object of memory, each man handing over the thing he carries.
