‘Gotta Serve Somebody’: Bob Dylan’s Devotional Journey Leads Him to Vatican for Meeting With Pope Leo

Pope Leo XIV and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan met at the Vatican on Wednesday in a mutually admiring encounter that underscores the emerging centrality of popular culture to the Bishop of Rome’s pontificate and the Nobel Laureate’s lifetime trek to spiritual fulfillment.Mr. Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, was in the Eternal City as his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour wends its way through Italy. Vatican News reports that “The Holy Father presented the singer with a rosary, while Dylan reciprocated with a book: ‘Chronicles: Volume One.’” That is Mr. Dylan’s own memoir. The two Midwestern “Bobs” — the pope was born Robert Prevost — presented a contrast in color. The pope wore his habitual white vestments. The Nobel laureate wore a hooded black robe.The Bishop of Rome has quoted Mr. Dylan before. In a preface to a book published in July, “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift,” the pope quoted Mr. Dylan’s line “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.” That verse, from a 1963 song, “Go Away You Bomb,” was intended as a warning against nuclear armament. This year the pope has also met the rapper Bad Bunny and another singer-songwriter, Patti Smith.The Vatican official who brokered the meeting between Pope Leo and Mr. Dylan, Reverend Antonio Spadaro, posted that “It was hard not to feel the emotion of being part of an encounter that had a real sense of history about it, with the feeling that, at every step through the Apostolic Palace, absolutely anything could happen!” The Vatican simply reports that the pope “received in private audience Mr. Robert Allen Zimmerman.”Mr. Dylan is no stranger to Holy Fathers. In 1997 he joined Pope John Paul II in Bologna before 300,000 faithful. Mr. Dylan performed “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and the pontiff quoted Mr. Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “You ask me: how many roads must a man walk down / before you can call him a man?” The Polish pope answered, “Only one. There is only one road for man, and that is the road of Jesus Christ.”Mr. Dylan, though, has walked down many religious roads. His mother was president of the local Hadassah, and his father was president of B’nai B’rith. He was bar mitzvahed at Agudath Achim Synagogue in Hibbing, Minnesota, but formally changed his name when he arrived in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1962. In 1978, he announced his conversion to Christianity following a mystical experience in Tucson. That led to the release of three consecutive albums inspired by evangelical Christianity.One song from this period, “You Gotta Serve Somebody,” includes lyrics like “But you’re gonna have to serve somebody/ Yes indeed, you’re gonna have to serve somebody/ Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord/ But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”Mr. Dylan has also maintained an enduring connection to the devoutly Orthodox Chabad movement of Judaism. The movement reports that in 2007 he attended Yom Kippur services at one of its synagogues in Atlanta, where he was called up to the Torah under his Hebrew name, Zushe ben Avraham. Mr. Dylan “said the blessings in Hebrew without stumbling, like a pro,” related Rabbi Yossi Lew. Mr. Dylan appeared at the 25th annual Chabad Telethon in 1989, where he wore a yarmulke and performed “Hava Nagila” on his famed harmonica.One of Mr. Dylan’s earliest songs, from 1962, is “Talkin’ Hava Nagilah Blues.” His 1967 classic, “All Along the Watchtower,” is deeply indebted to Isaiah, and “Highway 61 Revisited” features the iconic line “Oh, God said to Abraham, Kill me a son! / Abe says, Man, you must be puttin’ me on.” The reference is to the Biblical binding of Isaac, but the wink is to Mr. Dylan’s own father — Abraham Zimmerman.A different dimension of Mr. Dylan’s Jewish identity emerged in “Neighborhood Bully,” a 1983 track from the “Infidels” album. A song about Israel, Mr. Dylan croons that “Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone / Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon / He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand” and that the Jewish state, denounced as the “neighborhood bully,” is “criticized and condemned for being alive.”Mr. Dylan told the Wall Street Journal in 2022 — in an interview he reproduces on his website, that “I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.”

‘Gotta Serve Somebody’: Bob Dylan’s Devotional Journey Leads Him to Vatican for Meeting With Pope Leo

‘Gotta Serve Somebody’: Bob Dylan’s Devotional Journey Leads Him to Vatican for Meeting With Pope Leo

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