A Jesuit Priest Explains How He Facilitated Bob Dylan’s Meeting With the Pope

A popular Bob Dylan Substack interviewed Antonio Spadaro about the encounter

You’ve all seen the pictures by now. But now we know a little bit more about this week’s meeting between Bob Dylan and Pope Leo XIV, thanks to an e-mail interview in Flagging Down the Double E’s, the Bob Dylan deep-dive Substack run by Dylan expert Ray Padgett.

Padgett interviewed Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest serving as Undersecretary for Culture and Education at the Holy See who had previously brokered a meeting between the pope and Patti Smith. And although Spadaro respected the privacy of the one-on-one meeting between the two Midwesterners — Dylan famously hails from Hibbing, Minn., eight hours north of the pope’s Chicago hometown — he offered insight into their relationship and their encounter at the Vatican. “The way they looked at each other was beautiful, intense,” Spadaro told Padgett.

According to Spadaro, it somehow became apparent that Dylan was interested in meeting the pope, and vice versa. “Leo was completely open to it,” said Spadaro.

The pope is, among many other things, an American baby boomer who, earlier this summer, referenced in a footnote in a treatise on peace a Bob Dylan lyric so obscure that not even Padgett had ever heard of it. 

This isn’t the first time Dylan fans have learned new information about the singer-songwriter from Padgett, a self-described fan whom Rolling Stone spoke with last year about his never-ending Dylan scoops. 

In his exchange with Padgett, the priest also clarified some confusion about why everyone was talking about a certain Dylan song — 1967’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” — when discussing their encounter. (Pope Leo has been called “the first Augustinian Pope.”) 

The connection came, originally, from Spadaro himself. “I couldn’t help thinking that Dylan once dreamed of the saint whose son this Pope declared himself to be from the loggia of St. Peter’s,” Spadaro wrote to Padgett. “It’s a beautiful song, and a hard one: the dreamer wakes up and discovers he was part of the crowd that put Augustine to death.”

Trending Stories

Did Dylan and the Pope talk about this connection? 

“As for anything else said at that table,” said Spadaro, “it stays between the two of them. “