EDITOR’S NOTE: Still having serious technical problems with the blog, but I’m going to try to post a short one as an experiment…

America Magazine notes that while most popes refer to Scripture or other church documents in their missives, Pope Leo branches out:

Sometimes popes go rogue. Pope Francis liked to reference the English priest and novelist Robert Hugh Benson as well as Fyodor Dostoevsky. As is the case with any pope who reigns for more than a few years, the documents of the latter years of Francis’ tenure also had a lot of references to his own papal oeuvre. (If you want to get technical, even St. Luke liked that move: What’s the opening line of Acts of the Apostles? “In my first book, Theophilus…”) And Pope Benedict XVI liked to include Plato and other classical Greco-Roman authors as much as he did any church father.

What no pope has ever done until now, however? Quote Bob Dylan.

Dylan? I really like this pope. (And I LOVE Francis for the Dostoyevsky.) Of course, being a pontifex maximus, Leo goes DEEP with his Dylan. No “A hard rain’s gonna fall” or other stuff everybody knows, he digs down into arcana like a superfan:

In the foreword to a new book collecting his writings on peacemaking, Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, the pontiff quoted a 1963 Bob Dylan song, “Go Away You Bomb,” citing a line Dylan directed at nuclear weapons: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled.”

If you’ve never heard of the verse or the song, you’re not alone: “Go Away You Bomb” was never recorded by Dylan. He seems to have written the song in a day in 1963 at the request of Izzy Young of the Greenwich Village Folklore Center, and it only exists as a typewritten manuscript. The lyrics have the same tone and feel as “Masters of War,” the classic song released the same year on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” but Pope Leo didn’t cite that famous track: Instead, he dug deep, like a hipster tossing aside “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” for a vinyl B-side of something terrible from “Self-Portrait.”…

See, that’s cool. Reminds me of cool friends who were into Jeff Beck when I was in high school, while I didn’t know who he was. I was too busy trying to figure out whether Paul was dead. (You’ll be glad to know I decided he wasn’t.)

Now, we’ll see if I can post this…