Los Angeles, Nov 6 (IANS) Music legend, Bob Dylan recently met Pope Leo XIV, who had a private audience with the singer. The veteran singer is in Rome ahead of his Rough and Rowdy Ways concert at the Palazzo dello Sport on Thursday. He squeezed in some time, and paid a visit to the Pope's official residence, the Apostolic Palace, for a brief meeting.

The 85-year-old folk legend handed over a copy of his autobiography, ‘Chronicles: Volume One’ to the Pope. The pair posed for photographs, with the Pope’s all-white outfit contrasting starkly with Dylan's black ensemble.

The meeting was arranged with the help of a Vatican official who also helped set up the pope's encounter with Patti Smith earlier this year.

He took to his X, formerly Twitter, and shared a picture of the two. He wrote, “Today, I had the privilege and the joy of accompanying #BobDylan to meet Pope Leo, together with Andrea Monda. 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. Carlo Feltrinelli and Susan Pullman were also with us”.

“On July 31, Pope Leo had met with Patti Smith. I’m writing about it in L’Osservatore Romano”, he added.

Pope Leo previously referenced Dylan in the preface to a book titled ‘Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift’, quoting the singer's unreleased track ‘Go Away You Bomb’.

The track was written amid the Cold War in 1963 but never recorded. Its lyrics were discovered in 2013 and put up for auction, when they were seen for the first time. This isn't the first time the Like a Rolling Stone singer has met with a head of the Catholic Church. In 1997, he was invited to perform in front of Pope John Paul II and about 300,000 young people for the 23rd National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna.

--IANS

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