Speaking in Trieste at a recent event exploring Catholic Social Teaching, Pope Francis remarked, “It is evident that democracy is not in good health in today’s world.” He’s right, of course. But it’s not even clear what “democracy” means.

As a matter of etymology, democracy is the rule of the people. Plato discussed it at length in his Republic, though he preferred an aristocracy, a rule of the best. Athens, lamentably, fell apart because of the corruption of the best.

Democracy, in practice, has never been the rule of all the people. In Athens, most people weren’t eligible to vote. But that was then. How about now? Excluding children, most citizens can vote. Many do—and many don’t. For us, democracy amounts to a majoritarian transfer of power. Party A is in, Party B is out; then the process repeats itself.

So the majority rules, or more accurately, their representatives rule. But the representatives, in order to be elected, depend on money, lots of it, and more in every election. Money is the mother’s milk of politics. So money rules the representatives! Enter the plutocracy. And history shows that the plutocracy invites tyranny, first at the hands of the majority and then of its managers.

For us, democracy has devolved into a sad and spiritually shallow state of affairs. And many of us can’t imagine a practicable alternative. So oftentimes we try an end run. Both we and our masters (alive and well in our democracy) put a spin on democracy.

Pope Francis is on to the spin masters. Blowing the whistle he tells us, “It is our duty not to manipulate the word democracy nor to deform it with titles, empty titles, capable of justifying any action. Democracy is not an empty box.”

Instead he advocates what we might term “deep democracy.” For Francis, this democracy “is tied to the values of the person, of fraternity, and also of integral ecology.” In support of his advocacy, he appeals to an Italian economist. Blessed Giuseppe Toniolo (1845-1918) defined democracy as “that civil order in which all social, juridical and economic forces, in the fullness of their hierarchal development, cooperate properly for the common good, flowing into the final result to the prevalent advantage of the lower classes.”

Toniolo’s “civil order” takes us well beyond our own majoritarian, and manipulated, transfer of power. It brings us to a new politics of the common good. It commits us to a preferential option for the poor. Such a polity, ordered to the full cooperation of its members, is truly of the people and for the people—all of them.

Francis finds the same sense of democracy in the words of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was killed by terrorists in 1978. “A state is not truly a democracy if it is not at the service of man, if it does not have as its supreme goal the dignity, freedom and autonomy of the human person.” A deep democracy is also a deep humanism.

But building a deep democracy depends on our developing the virtue of civic friendship. It is a virtue that leads to civic engagement. We cannot be bystanders. Francis rightly insists that “the heart of politics is to participate.” This participation is a “taking care of the whole.” Doing so, he tells us, requires the courage “to think of ourselves as a people and not as my clan.”

St. John Paul II wrote often and wisely of participation. He saw it as the antithesis of today’s alienation. Before there is political participation, there must be a participation in our daily encounters with one another. This participation challenges our core egoism. While his language is that of a phenomenologist, it speaks of the Gospel. He writes that

what we call the commandment to love in its fundamental, elementary (in a sense still pre-ethical) layer, constitutes a call to experience the other man as “the other ‘I’”—that is, a call to participate in his humanity concretized in his person, just like my humanity is concretized in my person.

Only love will bring us to the beloved community. But Christians believe that love brings the cross. That’s why Dorothy Day so often reminded us of the words of Dostoyevsky’s Fr. Zossima: “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing.” Doubtless we’ll practice some harsh love if we speak from the heart to our poor democracy as it snorts and shuffles its way to November.