In his effort to distinguish between individual believers and their faith communities, Ventura sounds like many today who say, I believe in democracy, but I don t like government. Such a worldview reflects the notion that somehow people lose their virtue when they act in concert with others. Individual acts by a citizen are expressions of free will, but policies enacted by the people in a democracy are oppressive. The individual believer who lives out her faith is a saint, but a group of believers who does so are meddlers. Catholic thought offers another view.
People are both sacred and social.
Though flawed, each of us is capable of nobility. Though sinners, we can improve the world. And, because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, we can do more together than we can separately. Of course, institutions can only be as good as the people who comprise them, so a group of evil people can create disordered institutions. But that is not humankind s natural tendency.