Rock legend Patti Smith sat down with Pope Leo XIV at the Apostolic Palace for a warm, 40-minute private meeting, a cultural encounter that underscored the new pope's early outreach beyond the walls of the Church.

Smith, who has said she is not Catholic, greeted the pope with a single soft word when she took her seat across from him at his desk: "Hi." The moment carried a layer of meaning for anyone who knows her catalog. Her 1979 song "Wave", an imagined conversation with Pope John Paul I, who died after just 33 days on the throne of St. Peter, opens with the same greeting. AP News reported that Leo recognized the song and responded: "That was marvelous."

The meeting, which took place on a Friday at the Apostolic Palace, marked the second time in a single week that Leo hosted a major musical figure. Days earlier, on Wednesday, tenor Andrea Bocelli performed a concert in the pope's honor. For Leo, a Chicago native still in the early stretch of his papacy, the back-to-back encounters signaled an interest in engaging the arts that his predecessor, Pope Francis, also cultivated.

Two Chicago natives find common ground at the Vatican

Rev. Antonio Spadaro, an undersecretary in the Vatican's culture ministry and a friend of Smith's, joined her at the audience and later shared details of the encounter by text message. Spadaro noted that both Smith and Leo hail from Chicago, a shared origin that, by his account, helped set an easy tone from the start.

Spadaro described the meeting in language that sounded more like a reunion than a formal papal audience:

"It 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."

When the 40 minutes ended, Smith kept things simple again. "Bye. Bye," she said.

The visit was not Smith's first brush with the papacy. She met Pope Francis in 2013 and sang for him in 2014. Over the years she became, as the wire account put it, an increasingly visible presence at the Vatican, an unusual status for a self-described non-Catholic punk poet. She also performed at the inauguration of the Holy See's pavilion at the Venice Biennale contemporary art fair on May 8, a date that marked the anniversary of Leo's election.

Pope Leo XIV has already drawn attention for a string of consequential decisions early in his papacy. He elevated the archbishop who denied Nancy Pelosi Communion to the Vatican's highest court, a move that cheered many faithful Catholics who had felt sidelined under Francis.

Smith's Vatican ties stretch back more than a decade

Smith's connection to the Catholic world has always been more personal than theological. She was drawn, by her own account, to Pope Francis and his "gentle, open, and steadfast sense of humanity." When Francis died on April 21, 2025, Smith posted a poem on social media comparing him to a dandelion and writing: "Nature and poetry and the suffering shall miss their champion."

Her friendship with Spadaro appears to have been the bridge to the latest meeting. Spadaro, who works inside the Vatican's cultural apparatus, facilitated the audience, though the wire report did not specify how the invitation originated or what specific topics the two discussed beyond music and shared memories.

The broader picture of Leo's early papacy extends well beyond arts and culture. The Vatican recently pushed back sharply on White House claims that the pope was speaking as a politician rather than a pastor, a public exchange that showed Leo willing to hold his ground against secular political pressure.

Smith's 1979 song "Wave" remains the thread that ties her Vatican visits together across decades. The track imagined a conversation with Pope John Paul I, the pope who reigned for barely a month before his sudden death. Nearly half a century later, Smith walked into the Apostolic Palace and opened a real conversation with another pope, a fellow Chicagoan, using the same word that opens the song.

Leo's willingness to sit with a punk-rock icon who openly says she is not Catholic may raise eyebrows in some quarters. But it also fits a pattern. Vice President Vance responded "Praise Jesus" when Leo backed a U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, a reminder that this pope has shown he can engage the secular world without surrendering the moral authority of the office.

Leo has also demonstrated he will act decisively on matters of internal Church discipline, accepting a Peruvian bishop's resignation three months after sexual abuse allegations surfaced, the kind of accountability many Catholics have demanded for years.

Whether the Smith audience amounts to a footnote or a signal depends on what follows. A pope who knows the words to "Wave" and promotes the archbishop who stood up to Pelosi is, at minimum, harder to pigeonhole than his critics might like, and that alone is worth watching.