“Praise Be” as Feedback – Walking the Loops of Laudato Si’

Laudato Si' - Timothy Paul Schmalz

On a soft May morning in Rome—ten years after Laudato Si’ was published, and only weeks after Pope Francis slipped beyond our horizon—the bells of St. Peter’s tremble the air: boom-boom, boom-boom. A sound, a signal, a loop.

Francis never sketched a stock-and-flow diagram. But Laudato Si’, his encyclical on care for our common home, reads like a manifesto for systems thinking. If you follow it slowly, you’ll find loops linking paragraph to paragraph, insight to insight.

He describes a world where ecological harm feeds back into social harm. Where disconnection breeds despair. Where the Earth’s degradation becomes both cause and consequence of human suffering.

He called this spiral the “technocratic paradigm.”

In that paradigm, rivers are data points, forests become fiber, and people become parts in a growth engine. GDP rises? Success. Wetlands paved? Progress. Until, one day, the basement floods. The hospital fills. And the price is paid by those furthest from the deal.

CLD Throwaway Growth

Loop R₁ – Throwaway Growth

This is a self-reinforcing loop. The more we believe the story of infinite growth, the faster we mine, burn, and discard. And the more distance we create between what we value and what actually sustains life.

Francis’s insight? This isn’t just an economic or ecological loop—it’s a moral one. It’s a failure to see ourselves as part of the whole.

Loop B₁ – Integral Ecology

Integral Ecology Loop

But Laudato Si’ also offers a balancing loop. It invites us into what Francis calls integral ecology—the recognition that soil bacteria, subway commuters, whales, and pension funds are woven into the same system.

Here, hope isn’t just a feeling. It’s feedback. When mangroves are restored, floods are gentler. When forests return, air becomes breathable. When ecosystems recover, people feel better—and begin to believe again. The loop grows stronger.

Yet here’s the challenge: systems repair slowly. Soil builds in seasons, not cycles. Trust, too. So how do we notice improvement before the forest returns? Before the air clears?

This Common Home Is All We Have

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis writes: “The Earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.” He reminds us that our ecological crisis is not just a technical challenge—it’s a deeply human one.

And the loops we’re caught in are not permanent. They can be interrupted. Redirected. Redesigned.

This issue of Systems & Stories is about hearing those loops. Listening for the feedback. And recognizing that, despite all we’ve broken, we still hold the pen.

The loops of collapse are strong—but the loops of care are already in motion.

We just have to choose which story we strengthen.