Today's Gospel sounds familiar because it was our Gospel two Sundays ago. The daily and Sunday cycles are overlapping in Matthew 13, and we are confronted again with the coexistence of good and evil in the world we actually live in.

An authentically Catholic perspective is a realistic one, seeing things as they are, in the light of God's Word. Father Wilson points to Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, and to the discomfort of a text that simply describes reality in a media, educational, and political environment where reality is routinely bent to fit an ideology.

Why can Catholics afford to look at things honestly? Because of the cross. Jeremiah pleads with God out of military defeat, famine, and exile, asking why the blow cannot be healed, and that first great crisis anticipates the crisis of Calvary. We can face what is dark because it has already been confronted and conquered.

Readings (Tuesday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II):
• Jeremiah 14:17–22
• Psalm 79
• Matthew 13:36–43