Michael Thorner

Today, #November4, 2026, #BobDylan was received in audience by Pope Leo XIV. Together with the editor of L'Osservatore Romano, I accompanied him to the Apostolic Palace. The meeting had the feel of history about it, and at every step I had the sense that anything could happen. Speaking of peace, Leo brought up "Go Away You Bomb." In 1963, Izzy Young, who ran the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, was putting together a songbook against the atomic bomb; Dylan showed up the next day with the lyrics, typed. In the song, a man talks to the bomb, insults it, orders it to leave. The book never came out, and Dylan never recorded the song. In 2014, the typescript went on the block at Christie's and found no buyer, but the lyrics were published, and so a song that was never sung made its way to a pope's desk, in the company of Dorothy Day, Giorgio La Pira, and Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who, in 1983, declined to pass on a missile alert that the computers insisted was real. Leo is an Augustinian. In 1967, on John Wesley Harding, Dylan had dreamed of that saint. In "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," the narrator watches Augustine searching for those who have already sold their souls, witnesses his martyrdom, and realizes, with horror, that he is one of the crowd that put him to death. He wakes alone, in tears. The model was the old ballad about Joe Hill, the labor organizer executed by firing squad in Utah in 1915; Dylan put the Bishop of Hippo in his place and turned a rallying cry into an unwitting confession about our tendency to silence those who bring us the truth. Born in Chicago in 1955, Prevost grew up on the American music of those years. Jim Musselman, a classmate of his at Villanova and a Dylan devotee, recalls that the two of them talked about music a great deal, and that it was Musselman who got him to read an essay pointing to Dylan as the poetic talent of his generation. The Pope who introduced himself from the loggia of St. Peter's as "a son of St. Augustine" knows Dylan's music, and Dylan was glad to meet the American Pope.