The Godmother of Punk Meets Pope Leo XIV — and Catholic Right Revolts
The poet who eulogized Francis as a dandelion among stones sat across Leo’s desk Friday and said “Hi.” Hours later, LifeSiteNews wanted to know why she got an audience and the SSPX got none.
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Patti Smith sat down across the desk from Pope Leo XIV in the Apostolic Palace on Friday morning and said, softly, “Hi.”
Leo said it back to her, and then he laughed.
The greeting carried freight. Smith closed her 1979 album Wave with a title track built around an imagined conversation with Pope John Paul I, the pope of thirty-three days, and the recording opens with her voice saying “Hi. Hi.” Leo knew the song, the AP reported. “That was marvelous,” he told her.
They talked for roughly forty minutes. Smith is seventy-nine, wore her braids and a Franciscan Tau cross, was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and has never called herself Catholic, and was born in Chicago — the same city that produced the man across the desk from her.
Fr. Antonio Spadaro, the undersecretary at the Dicastery for Culture and Education whose friendship has made Smith a recurring presence at the Vatican, sat in on the meeting and wrote afterward that the audience “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.”
A spark was lit, he said — “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.”
Those last two words, shared mission, are what lit the other kind of fire.
She loved Francis first
Smith’s relationship with the papacy did not start on Friday. She met Francis at a general audience in April 2013, a month into his pontificate. The following December, she sang at the Christmas concert staged in Rome under Vatican patronage, and in 2017 she returned for the twenty-fifth edition, held inside the Vatican’s own Paul VI Hall.
The bookings produced the controversy you would predict. An Italian Catholic committee called Portosalvo tried to stop a date on the same 2014 tour — an acoustic set inside the Basilica di San Giovanni Maggiore in Naples on December 9 — arguing that a consecrated church should not be handed over for a rock concert. English-language coverage folded that protest into the Rome booking and pinned it to the opening line of “Gloria,” the first track on her 1975 debut Horses: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Smith brushed it aside. Asked about the Vatican date at a New York screening that November, she told a Guardian writer in the room, “I like Pope Francis, and I’m happy to sing for him. Anyone who would confine me to a line from 20 years ago is a fool!” She has since described the lyric as the work of a young woman who wanted to answer for her own wrongdoing rather than hand it to somebody else.
Then Francis died on April 21, 2025. Smith posted a photograph of a dandelion she had come across that morning in Japan.
This is a little flower a dandelion humble yet strong. I saw it this morning and was moved. Farewell dear Pope Francis. Nature and poetry and the suffering shall miss their champion.
Days later she told Vatican News what she thought he had left behind. “In losing Pope Francis, we don’t lose him, but he has gone on,” she said. “We have to take the words he cherished — love, humility, compassion — and believe them with our hearts.” On the friendship itself she was briefer: “Everything is heart to heart with him.”
This past May she opened the Holy See’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale with a sound prayer, performed on the first anniversary of Leo’s election.
The revolt
The Vatican released an edited video of Friday’s encounter. LifeSiteNews ran its headline the same day: “Pope Leo meets pro-abortion singer Patti Smith as Vatican official hails ‘shared mission.’”
The quotes underneath that headline are real. Speaking in Argentina in February 2018, Smith said that where abortion is concerned, saving the lives of young women matters more than resting the decision on any ideology. Two days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, she told Rolling Stone Italia that the ruling was terrible and that it had broken her heart.
John-Henry Westen, the site’s co-founder, then arrived at the complaint that actually drives the piece. Leo had received the Godmother of Punk, he wrote, and “he couldn’t meet with the SSPX.”
That answer is a matter of public record. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández warned the Society of St. Pius X in May that its planned July 1 episcopal consecrations would amount to a “schismatic act”. The day before the ceremony, Leo released a letter calling the plan a sin of extreme gravity and asking the society to turn back.
They consecrated the bishops anyway, at Écône on July 1. The next day the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith excommunicated the two bishops who performed the ceremony and the four men they consecrated, extending the decree past the clergy to lay faithful who formally adhere.
Rome gave the Lefebvrists a hearing. What they did with it was walk out.
Leo answered this last autumn
The deeper objection is not new either, and the pope disposed of it on the last day of September, when conservative bishops went after Cardinal Blase Cupich for honoring Senator Dick Durbin.
“Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” Leo told reporters at Castel Gandolfo. He applied the same standard to immigration enforcement: “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Two weeks later he handed Cupich a seat on the commission that governs Vatican City State, an appointment the Chicago cardinal’s critics had spent the month trying to make unthinkable.
The theology of the audience hall
Catholics have watched this instrument work for more than sixty years. Paul VI preached the Mass of the Artists in the Sistine Chapel on May 7, 1964, in front of painters, sculptors, writers and architects, and put the Church in the position of supplicant: “We need you. We need your collaboration in order to carry out our ministry …” Deprived of their help, he warned, that ministry “would become faltering and uncertain.”
Francis pushed the invitation to its most uncomfortable edge. In June 2023, he hosted roughly 200 artists in the same chapel, and the guest list included Andres Serrano, whose 1987 photograph Piss Christ became the center of the 1989 congressional fight over federal arts funding and shorthand for blasphemy in American public life for a generation
Francis told that room they were like visionaries, “a bit like prophets,” and said their work sets out to reveal “reality also in its contradictions.” Serrano said the pope playfully slapped his wrist and gave him a thumbs up.
Leo has kept the door on the same hinge. He welcomed Hollywood’s directors and producers to the Vatican and called cinema a workshop of hope. The journalist Gareth Gore spent over forty minutes with him in the apostolic library and used the time to ask that Opus Dei be shut down if the evidence warrants it.
Transgender Catholics ate lunch with him at the Jubilee of the Poor. A modest Muslim prayer room opened in the Vatican Library, and Laura Loomer and Raymond Arroyo went to war over a rug.
Narrow the guest list to people who already hold the Church’s positions and what is left is a caucus with incense.
An audience confers nothing doctrinal. The papacy has used it for centuries to signal that a particular human being is worth listening to, and that is the whole of what happened on Friday morning.
Nobody in Rome is confused about what the Catholic Church teaches on abortion, least of all the man whose job is to teach it. Friday’s lesson was smaller and harder to swallow: a seventy-nine-year-old poet who has spent fifty years arguing with God in public can walk into the Apostolic Palace in a Tau cross, say “Hi,” and be received as a friend.
Smith called Francis a dandelion — humble, stubborn, pushing up through stone. Her critics spent this week arguing for more stone. Leo gave her forty minutes and a laugh.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the artists, the poets, the doubters and the half-believers whom the Church has always needed and too often turned away — and with a pope who understands that the Gospel was never a members-only building.
Human dignity does not have to be earned through correct opinions. Every person is born already holding it, and the entire moral architecture of Catholic social teaching rests on that one stubborn claim.
Any Church that will only receive the already-persuaded has quietly stopped believing what it says it believes.
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More and more I love this man and the lessons he offers through his actions.
Thank you for a valuable article. I am mo longer a Xian; have not been for a long time. Neverteless, I still admire the R.C.s for their wisdon and for Vatican-II, the latter ofwhich Popes Francis and Leo XIV have tied to extend. ¡Bravò, esteemed holy men, Bravò!