“No, it is innocence that is full, and experience that is empty.
It is innocence that wins, and experience that loses.
It is innocence that increases, and experience that decreases.
It is innocence that is born, and experience that dies.
It is innocence that knows, and experience that does not know.
It is the child who is full, and the man who is empty.
So that, says God, that’s what I think of your ‘experience.’”
~~The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, Charles Peguy
The Oxford dictionary records that the word innocence is becoming virtually extinct in common English usage. Words do not simply vanish by accident; they disappear when the values they once expressed are abandoned. The eclipse of innocence from our vocabulary may be the linguistic obituary of a civilization that has forgotten the priceless gift it was meant to protect. A word fades from the language when the culture that gave it life no longer prizes its meaning.
When Innocence is banished from the vernacular, it is soon banished from the conscience. A virtue that is mocked, neglected or ignored withers on the cultural vine. Signs abound that the verbal assault on innocence will be soon targeted for total extinction. As George Orwell sardonically observed, “it’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
When innocence disappears from our vocabulary, it soon disappears from our priorities, our lives and consciousness. A virtue that is no longer named is no longer pursued; a virtue that is no longer celebrated is no longer defended. Cultures do not preserve what they refuse to value, and they rarely value what they cease to speak about. Innocence will be recovered only when we restore it to our language, reclaim it as an indispensable virtue, and embue our families, our institutions, and our laws toward its uncompromising protection.
Few Americans realize that the virtue of innocence is embodied in the sacred ceremony of the folding of the American Flag during the solemn burials of patriots. Significantly, the eighth fold of the American flag represents innocence, honoring those who served without evil intent and it also pays tribute to George Washington. The explanation of its importance is moving and noteworthy. Innocence is firmly rooted in the meaning of the Eighth Fold of the United States of America Flag:
Innocence: Means being free from sin and evil.
Service: Honors people who work for freedom with a pure heart.
George Washington: Reminds us of his famous words about his love for the country. “The love of my country will be the ruling influence of my conduct.”
Perhaps that is why the symbolism resonates so deeply. The soldier’s final tribute is not simply to victory, but to virtue. A nation that honors innocence beside the coffin of its heroes acknowledges that innocence is among the highest good of the Republic. If patriots have been willing to die to preserve it, then citizens must be willing to protect it. The defense of innocence is not peripheral to American patriotism; it is one of the noblest expressions of our national identity.
What happened to Us—to Innocence Lost?
Modern society failed to recognize the obvious unique vulnerability of children, resulting in a relinquishment of a duty to protect them.
“Children then are not adults in miniature. They are beings per se, different from their elders in their mental nature, their functioning, their understanding of events, and their reactions to them. “
“Beyond the Best Interests of the Child.”
~Anna Freud, Joseph Goldstein, Albert J. Solnit
Seemingly, we are awash in sexual scandals with children brutally robbed of their innocence by the rich and powerful, our institutions, and the community-all those entrusted entities which should have protected them. Think only of the daily news drumbeat of drag queen story hour, highly sexualized pre-school curriculum, naked pride parades, gender mania, sex infused media and sports.
Did consumerism do more than commercialize products—did it commercialize childhood itself? When everything is assigned a market value, children risk becoming commodities to be exploited, trafficked, marketed, discarded, and consumed rather than human beings to be cherished, protected, and loved. The revenue stream for a pimp of a trafficked child is $200,000 per year. The younger the child, the more profit a trafficker makes. This fungible human product can be repeatedly resold around the world. In such a culture, childhood itself becomes vulnerable to commodification. Babies bred and purchased for surrogacy. Aborted fetal baby parts sold to universities, big pharma, and medical research. The fetal tissue marketplace is as lucrative as the black market for child sexual exploitation.
Modernity declared all out war on children. The global elite demanded that children be aborted, exploited, silenced, trafficked, killed, euthanized, sterilized, transitioned, corrupted, pornified, cloned, groomed, sexualized, surrogated, genitally mutilated, bio-engineered, harvested, drugged, regendered, transgendered, bigendered, sold, sliced and diced for body parts, for vaccines, for experimentation, drugged and sacrificed on the demonic high altar of depopulation.
In the prescient words of Fr. Malachi Martin, SATAN IS ON THE MARCH and the elite are in lockstep as they snuff out life, obliterate innocence, dismantle the family, and destroy freedom by engaging in modern slavery.
Innocence is no longer treasured as a gift to be cherished, guarded, and prolonged. When everything acquires a price, nothing remains sacred. Children cease to be regarded as unique precious individuals and become objects of adult desire, commercial interest, ideological agendas or criminal enterprises. A society that puts a price on everything eventually risks recognizing the intrinsic worth of nothing.
History repeatedly demonstrates that the greatest child abuse scandals were not sustained merely by the depravity of individual offenders, but by cultures of denial, deference, institutional self protection, and fear of exposing uncomfortable truths. The common denominator was not simply the predator; it was the failure of those with the authority to intervene.
Whether the perpetrators were the UK Pakistani rape gangs, Belgium’s Marc Dutroux, Jimmy Savile of the BBC, Jeffrey Epstein or Catholic clergy, a striking pattern emerges. Warnings were ignored-intentionally so? Victims were dismissed or discredited, whistleblowers were marginalized and vile crimes went unpunished. Officials feared reputational damage, political consequences, legal liability or professional reprisal. In far too many cases, institutional preservation eclipsed the paramount duty to protect children.
350,000 Belgians in the White March for the Innocence of the Children, October 20, 1996, protesting the Belgian government’s cover up in the case of serial pedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux
The enduring lesson of these scandals is both sobering and universal: child abuse becomes systemic not simply because evil exists, but because institutions fail to confront it. When protecting reputations takes precedence over protecting children, predators gain time, victims lose hope, and justice is delayed, or denied. Every cover up, every ignored warning, every act of intimidation against whistleblowers extends the life of abuse. Something even deeper and more sinister is at play in the culture as evil is no longer recognized and truth is devalued, as outmoded and irrelevant. To confront either requires a heavy cost—courageous action—a cost society is no longer willing to take.
The sad and plaintive cries from the lost boys of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies reverberate in the damage of modernity’s abandonment of children:
“There aren’t any grownups. We shall have to look after ourselves. …Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air.”
Ultimately, evil filled the void left by a culture that abandoned God. The great French author George Bernanos observed that the “Christian West has lost its child’s heart.” It has lost its child’s heart because it has lost God. In his stirring novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, Bernanos plaintively described the duty of the Church to protect childhood:
God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
Perhaps, there is no more devastating commentary on our age than that one of humanity’s most sacred virtues has been exiled from our language, diminished in our culture, and relegated to the status of an obsolete expression. Yet the human price and toll of innocence lost is far more than an outdated expression; it indicates the collapse of a moral order that no longer recognizes childhood as sacred or worthy of its fiercest protection. It signals the moral impoverishment of a civilization that has forgotten its first duty—to protect its children.
This is the measure of a nation’s conscience, the depth of its moral failures, and the lasting burden carried by those whose childhood was stolen before it had a chance to bloom. It is an unmistakable warning of a society in moral retreat, a civilization that has ceased to recognize the protection of its children as its highest and most sacred obligation. Every child whose innocence is stolen leaves behind a wound that scars not only the victim, but the conscience of an entire nation.
How is the loss captured? How is the damage measured? The marks are buried in a myriad of ways, seen and unseen on society, on families, and most especially on the victims who are robbed of their potential to succeed and be happy.
Statistics can count the crimes; they cannot count what was taken. They cannot measure the child who never fulfilled her potential, the family that never recovered, the trust that was never restored, or the immeasurable gifts to society that died with stolen innocence. Some losses defy arithmetic because they are measured not in numbers, but in human destiny. Statistics record offenses; they do not record the future that was stolen. Our future is bereft of both children and the magic of their innocence.
The defining question of every institution is therefore not whether evil can enter its ranks, but whether it possesses the moral courage to expose it, confront it, and eradicate it before more children are harmed.
Take off the blinders. Awake to the horror that failure to protect our most vulnerable comes at a huge price.
What becomes of a society that repeatedly betrays its children? What harvest can be expected when innocence is violated, trust is shattered, and those entrusted with protection fail in their duty? Are we witnessing the bitter consequences of generations robbed of childhood—wounds that echo through broken lives, fractured families, violence, addiction, despair, and endless cycles of abuse? A civilization that abandons its children should not be surprised when those unhealed wounds return to haunt its future. The wounds inflicted on children do not remain in childhood; they reverberate across generations and leave their mark on the conscience of an entire civilization.
Finally, Bernanos issued a warning that must be heeded by modernity:
“The world shall be judged by children. The spirit of childhood shall judge the world. Christians, who listen to me--that is your peril! It is difficult to follow upon a society that has foundered in laughter, because even the fragments will be useless. You will have to build it all up again. You will have to build it up under the eyes of children. Become as children yourselves. They have found the chink in your armor, and you will never disarm their irony save by simplicity, honesty and audacity. You will never disarm them save by heroism.”
"And Jesus said: 'Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3.
Elizabeth, so well written but so difficult to read….may God bless you for exposing so poignantly the horrific truth about the virtue of lost innocence.
I’m of a generation that came before the “boomers” and was taught by my parents and through my Catholic education the value and importance of virtue.
Unfortunately that word is becoming extinct and undoubtedly will be obsolete in no time. As I was reading your article I thought of so many virtues that have gone by the wayside, one being the virtue of chastity. I wonder if anyone even knows what it means?
Thank you for being a “voice in the wilderness “….children are the future and certainly a gift from God!
Well done Liz! As a fellow Catholic who spent decades in the battle to protect children, your reminder of the sacredness of innocence is exactly what our country AND the world must never be allowed to forget. God bless you and your continued battle to fight for traditional Catholic values and the most innocent of our society.