Two Americans, two journeys, but how many roads?

November 15, 2026 — 5:30am

Two shepherds met recently. One wore white, the other black. They both carried their faith with them to the meeting; the one in white conspicuously so, the other beneath the hood. Their meeting made news worldwide, for one was Pope Leo and the other was Bob Dylan, songwriter legend and Nobel laureate. Shepherds both, but with different flocks, and with different meanings to the description.

Pope Leo tends a global flock of more than a billion followers of the Catholic Church. Dylan’s flock cannot be quantified, and nor would he consider himself as tending it, but in many of his followers there is an unbreakable thread of devotion. His music has tested that strand over the course of a career of almost 70 years. But to paraphrase the man himself, he’s an artist, he don’t look back. One of those followers, as it happens, in a sort of divine coincidence, is the Pope, also from the American Midwest, the former from Chicago, the latter from Duluth.

Pope Leo quoted Dylan’s lyric in the preface to a book entitled Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, published by the Vatican Publishing House. The words weren’t from one of Dylan’s universally known songs such as Blowin’ in the Wind, but from an ultra-obscure one from 1963 that was never released. The song was Go Away You Bomb, the lyric the Pope quoted, “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.” Some may say, it was easy to see why it never saw the light of day.

At the recent meeting in the Apostolic Palace in Rome, the Pope gave Dylan a rosary, while Dylan gave the Pope a copy of his book Chronicles: Volume One.

Dylan’s trajectory towards the spiritual light began in the public eye in the half shadows and side streets of lyrical allusions in his early works in the 1960s, only for it to burst into flame in the late 1970s and early 1980s when his conversion to Christianity was recorded, literally, in the trilogy of albums Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. There was no mistaking the intent of the music. This was sermon without preaching, that soul and spirit had discovered the other self and merged into one. Its outlet was song. For followers, it was either a parting of the ways, a cementing of the relationship, or a wistful, see you when you get back reaction. For Dylan, it was affirmation.

While the overt display of his faith has subsided, the thread stills runs within. Indeed, in 1997 Dylan, along with other artists, performed at the National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna. He met Pope John Paul, had a few words with him and a handshake. The pope had quoted Blowin’ in the Wind to the audience: “You ask me: how many roads must a man walk down/before you can call him a man?” The pope answered: “Only one. There is only one road for man, and that is the road of Jesus Christ.”

One suspects Dylan would agree. After all, you’ve got to serve somebody. In that service, for both men, is the shepherd.

Warwick McFadyen is a desk editor at The Age.

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