Cindy Wooden | Catholic News Service

The Gospel parable of the “wasteful sower” who casts seeds on fertile soil as well as on a rocky path “is an image of the way God loves us,” Pope Leo XIV told visitors and pilgrims at his first weekly general audience.

The parable can strike people as odd because “we are used to calculating things — and at times it is necessary — but this does not apply in love,” the pope told an estimated 40,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square May 21.