Two Bobs: Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo XIV

Pope Leo XIV and Bob Dylan, Vatican City, November 4, 2026 via Vatican Media / Getty

Last Wednesday, while on his “Autumn Lights” concert tour in Europe, Bob Dylan was invited to the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City to meet the Pope. Pope Leo XIV, born and raised in Chicago as Robert Francis Prevost, became an Augustinian friar almost fifty years ago and was ordained in 1982. He’s a Doctor of Canon Law (he received his degree from the Collegio Angelico in Rome) and spent much of his adult life in Peru, first as a missionary and ultimately as a bishop. Prevost has always been a teacher, thinker, and lover of books—like his parents, a school superintendent and a librarian.

You can read all about the meeting itself, at least, such public details as have been released—even those who arranged the meeting insist on keeping most of those details rightly private. In the photographs taken, Dylan can be seen talking to the Pope, signing a book for one of the men in the room with a four-color Bic pen, and walking in one of the palace halls.

Dylan and Pope Leo XIV in conversation, via Vatican Media / Getty

Remarkably, and weirdly, a lot of the articles about this meeting, as well as social media posts, have given most attention to Dylan’s appearance. Part of this is surely because he is hard to photograph. Mobbed by cameras since he was 21 years old, Dylan has always guarded his public image—hiring expert photographers who were also good friends, like Barry Feinstein, to document his tours, and famously (infamously, to fans wedded to crummy blurry shots of him on stage) banning photography and video/audio recording from his concerts in recent years. At the Vatican, faced with official photographers, Dylan looks resigned and even at ease. I wish that people had even bothered to write about how pleased and comfortable both men looked, really. Dressed in black trousers and a Gauthier Borsarello jacket from 2022, a black hoodie, and black gloves, a white shirt, and loosely tied polka-dot tie, Dylan carried an umbrella with him (it didn’t rain in Rome that day—mild and partly sunny—but Dylan’s never been a sun-worshiper).

Pope Leo XVI and Dylan in the hall, via Vatican Media / Getty

Not only the internet, which likes to erupt, erupted; so did a host of fashion magazines. Gentlemen’s Quarterly complained about the hood pulled up “like he’s a sulking teenager forced to attend an uncle’s 50th birthday party.” The Daily Beast surfed comments from Reddit, Twitter / X and other social media outlets in which people complained that Dylan’s outfit was “disrespectful.” The New York Times made what the men were wearing their headline. The Washington Post, too, focused on the clothes, joking in conclusion “the pair looked uncannily like the duo you don’t want to see at the end of your hospital bed.” Dylan fan accounts and Dylanologists all across the ol’ world wide web can’t stop talking about his onstage hoods, in particular. The consensus is that he’s hiding from surreptitious cameras, though emulating a boxer and perhaps having a cold head are floated possibilities, too. Somehow none of this is news; Dylan has been a fan of covering his head for very many decades, from his teenage caps to cowboy hats to sombreros and scarf-and-hat combinations that function very like a hood. Maybe, after this weekend is over, everyone will have stopped talking about Dylan’s sartorial choices at the Vatican…. though talking about Dylan’s sartorial choices has been popular for a very long time. He does let himself in for it, a bit, by being a dude when it comes to dress; and also by changing his style over the years: young Huck Finn, the Newport black leather jacket and Cuban boots, that houndstooth suit, country Bob in Woodstock, the wild whiteface raggle-taggle-gypsy look of Rolling Thunder, leather vests and eyeliner and that dangly feathered earring…. I could go on, but won’t. Some of the earliest images of Dylan that are publicly available, and which were sold by RR Auction in 2022 along with a collection of his letters to a high school girlfriend, show a stylish 17-year-old with an Elvis / Little Richard pompadour, sharp gentleman’s jackets with crisp lapels, and collared dress shirts in striped patterns and what shines like black silk.

Bob Dylan 1974, courtesy of and © Barry Feinstein

The WaPo did get one thing right; Dylan’s clothes were “a variation on what the famously taciturn Dylan has been wearing to perform and appear in public in recent years[.]” Indeed, the hoodie and jacket he wore to the Vatican look just like what he’s been wearing on stage—not a variation, but from what I can see in people’s cellphone photos, the same zippers and pocket lines, exactly. And always black. Dylan likes black suits. I’ve wondered if he wears them for the same reason his friend Johnny Cash was the Man in Black for so long. Listen, actually listen to the words of the song. Cash makes it clear that he doesn’t want to have to be the Man in Black, but he has important reasons.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down

Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town

I wear it for the prisoner who is long paid for his crime

But is there because he's a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who've never read

Or listened to the words that Jesus said

About the road to happiness through love and charity

Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me…..

*

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything's okay

But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black.

Bob Dylan on stage, November 5, 2026, Rome, © Filippo de Orchi on Instagram

Until his meeting with Pope Leo XIV, Dylan has been the Man in Black on this autumn tour. After he left Vatican City, Dylan and his band had a night off in Rome. The following evening, Thursday, November 5, they played the Palazzo dello Sport—and the black hoodie was gone, or at least—is the right word submerged? Layered below, and not above, anyway. Since so much has been made of Dylan’s wearing black to meet the Pope, what about his change of color immediately after meeting the Man in White? Rome’s weather was cool and cloudy that next night, with a chance of rain. And Dylan was in a lighter shade of pale: the snuck-out photographs of him from the evening show him in a light-colored, hooded jacket. In some of the few available images, the hooded coat looks yellow—but the stage lights are a very dark yellow themselves, so I’m not sure. Surely, a pale yellow slicker is customary rain gear. But in other images, the jacket looks cream or white. Perhaps the lighter color stemmed from a lightening of the spirit—in Johnny Cash’s idiom, a little darkness carried off the back. Meeting the Pope is a beatitude, after all, reflected in the traditional papal blessing the words of which I share here with you on this Saturday eve: Benedicat te omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen.