However, John Paul II also highlighted that a democracy cannot be individualist, as a free civil society is one that provides "a widespread opportunity for participation in the goods only available to persons through cooperation". John Paul II also stressed the need for subsidiarity and the need for local self-government that would preserve regional cultures, and remarked that a "high degree of moral achievement" and adherence to Catholic virtues as well as "courage, moderation, justice, and prudence" are needed for democracy to succeed. Pope Benedict XVI defined democracy as protector of human dignity, and stressed that abandoning "moral reasoning" in favor of purely technical reasoning promoted by total understanding of "modern science and technology" can lead to a "dictatorship of relativism", which would lack universal moral values. Benedict XVI warned that "without a consciousness of the moral law, democracy cannot be sustained and degenerates into the dictatorship of relativism or what Tocqueville famously called the “tyranny of the majority.”
