Pope Leo’s meeting with Patti Smith highlights rocker’s Church-adjacent artistry

VATICAN CITY (OSV News) — The American singer-songwriter Patti Smith met with Pope Leo XIV July 31 in a private audience at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

Video shared of the meeting shows Smith grinning and giddy as she shakes the hand of Pope Leo, who, like her, was born in Chicago, before the two sat down and exchanged further greetings.

Jesuit Father Antonio Spardaro, former editor-in-chief of the Jesuit biweekly review La Civiltà Cattolica and current undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, and Smith’s friend, accompanied her in the 40-minute meeting.

Posting on X after the meeting, he wrote, “When that door opened, something happened … a spark was lit — one that came with a few lighthearted moments, but also with a profound sense of emotion and of a shared mission in this challenging world.”

Noting they were “Two Americans. Two Chicagoans. Two remarkable figures whose voices speak hope to a divided world,” Father Spardaro said, “It was a long audience that felt more like a conversation between two people discovering they were old friends, sharing memories woven from words and music, dreams, visions, and hopes — both from yesterday and for today.”

The meeting followed the Patti Smith Quartet’s July music tour of 10 European cities, including Rome, where she performed in Circo Massimo July 27.

Smith’s connection to Vatican cultural events began more than a decade ago. After meeting Pope Francis during a general audience in April 2013, less than a month after he was elected, the longtime rocker performed at the 2014 Vatican Christmas Concert. She returned for a performance at the 2021 annual Christmas concert.

Smith, 79, also participated this year at a May 8 event inaugurating the Holy See’s Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, a cultural exhibition. According to Vatican Media, there she “performed a sound prayer created in collaboration with the Soundwalk Collective, a key artistic partner in the exhibition project promoted by the Dicastery for Culture and Education.” The event coincided with the one-year anniversary of Pope Leo’s election.

Smith, who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, has expressed a complicated and at times defiant relationship with organized religion in her music and interviews. Her 1975 version of her single “Gloria” opens with Smith saying, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” a line she downplayed in a 2014 interview following the Christmas concert. “Anyone who would confine me to a line from 20 years ago is a fool!” she said. “I’m not against Jesus, but I was 20 and I wanted to make my own mistakes and I didn’t want anyone dying for me.”

However, she also has claimed to have a lifelong interest in spirituality. Her 1979 song “Wave” imagined a conversation with Pope John Paul I after his sudden death after a monthlong papacy. She has expressed admiration for St. Francis of Assisi and said in a 2015 interview that before Pope Francis’ election she had hoped a pope would take the saint’s name.

When Pope Francis died in April 2025, she publicly mourned him and in a poem described him as humble yet strong like a dandelion. “Though not a Catholic I was drawn to this kind, openminded and staunch humanitarian,” she wrote the day of his death on her Substack newsletter. “I felt safer knowing he was among us, doing his best to follow and preach Christ’s teachings.”

She also co-wrote a song for German director Wim Wender’s 2018 documentary film on Pope Francis, “Pope Francis: A Man of his Word.”

Smith has also collaborated with Father Spadaro. In March, Commonweal published Father Spadaro’s interview with Smith in which he wrote, “Ours is a friendship that resists easy explanation.”

Smith wrote a preface for Father Spadaro’s 2026 book on Jesus, and, also in Commonweal, the priest reviewed Smith’s 2025 memoir “Bread of Angels,” calling her a “wild mystic.”

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