I will begin with a confession that will make everything that follows make more sense.

I almost did not write this. I sat with it for three weeks, moving it around in my head the way you move furniture you are not sure you want to throw out. I knew what I wanted to say. I knew why I was hesitating. The hesitation had a name, and the name was cowardice, and I have decided that recognising cowardice and continuing to practise it are two different kinds of failure, and I am only willing to commit to one of them.

A few weeks ago I sat with a young man I have known since he was a boy. His mother is someone I respect enormously. He received his sacraments in a parish I know well; attended a school the Church helped build; and grew up inside a community that told him, repeatedly and sincerely, that truth matters, that conscience matters, and that the life of the mind is sacred. He is quick and warm, and when he talks, you can feel the intelligence behind his eyes.

He told me, with the calm certainty of someone reading from a prepared statement, that an IAS officer had personally supervised postmortem procedures following 41 deaths in Karur in September 2025. I explained what those processes actually involve. The institutional layers. The legal requirements. The tedious, unglamorous bureaucratic reality that looks nothing like the story he had absorbed from somewhere. He listened with the patience of someone waiting for me to finish. Then he told me that 80 per cent of government employees had voted for TVK (Tamil Victory Party).

No source. No uncertainty. Not a crack in the confidence.

I drove home, and I sat in my car in the dark for longer than I want to admit. Not because I was surprised. Because I was not surprised. Because I have had versions of this conversation a dozen times in the past two years, with young people from good families, educated young people, and young people the Church has invested in and prayed over and confirmed and sent out into a world that........

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