Our collective grief, especially here in Texas where we knew multiple generations of girls who spent the happiest of summer times at Camp Mystic, is a heavy lead blanket. The death toll keeps rising, and there are still so many missing. Texas reels to a slow-motion dirge.

What strikes us hardest is the little girls, woken in the sleepiest part of the morning of July 4th, and swept away in the flood surge. I remember, as a kid, being slightly uneasy at sleepaway camp, never quite adjusting to being away from my parents at night. These girls, as young as 8, terrified in the dark, break my heart in places that haven’t been exposed for decades.

Two sisters were found deceased, clinging to each other and holding their rosaries. Toward the end of The Lord of the Rings, when the world is falling down in cinders around their heads, Frodo says to Sam, “I’m glad to be here with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things.” When everything comes apart, having your best friend next to you is an amazing grace. It’s one small comfort in a sea of sorrow.

The fact that we are most grieved by the loss of little girls is not sexist or racist or any other -ist that people invent. It’s natural. We would be sorrowful at the death of any child, but there is something particularly poignant about little girls. Before the scolding censors of our modern brains kick in and tell us that we should not mourn little girls any more than little boys…we spontaneously do.

The raw reaction of our hearts is a recognition that there is something special about little girls, something precious, quickly lost and unrepeatable. Even Pope Leo noted it when he expressed condolences to the bereaved families who had lost loved ones, “in particular, their daughters.”

Little girls of a certain age are all hope and promise, especially girls being raised to honor and love Jesus, as attendance at a Christian camp implies. I’m thinking especially of the 8-year-old girls in the Bubble Inn cabin, closest to the river. At that age, cuteness precedes beauty. They still have missing teeth, untamed hair, funny smiles.

The word I have consistently heard in tributes to these girls and the impressions they left on others is “joy.” You’d think joy was endemic to 8-year-old girls. And it should be. They are of an age before makeup, pretense, jealousy, competition, and ranking over the attention of boys. It is truly an age of innocence, and the fact that most girls in our culture lose that innocence in just a few more years should make us rend our garments in grief and shame.

The virgins of the world are golden vessels, priceless and lovely to behold. Only the virginal are able to offer their entire, unfractured hearts to a man in marriage. And when a woman’s heart is whole (and her husband guards it as a treasure) she is capable of stupendous heroism; she holds nothing back. She is like the mythical pelican who will pierce her own breast to feed her beloved with her blood.

Mary’s virginal heart was capable of bottomless love, for Jesus and then for us. Her undivided heart was as artless and unfathomable at 45 as it was at 8. Oh, that we could help our daughters retain that singular beauty for longer than their first eight or 10 years.

What does our culture do to little girls? I see women on social media, stone-faced, angry and retaliative, preening their dominance over the male world, preferring “rights” over joy. You can almost see the tragedy looming in their past by the distance they’ve travelled since joy was the essence of their 8-year-old selves.

There is a 100% chance that every enraged or vindictive woman once had a tender, open heart. We are born that way. Our hearts are inexhaustible before they’re broken. Some barely have a chance; one of my best friends was 7 when she was slammed into adulthood by her mother’s boyfriend. Older girls often believe the lie that sex is how they prove themselves and establish their autonomy. When they have relations too early with none of the guardrails in place, they are inevitably dumped, betrayed, and cast off as disposable. Scars form. The heart puts up walls. The unadulterated joy of a virginal heart is irretrievably lost.

We must rethink what this culture does to girls, taking what is most precious in female nature and transforming it into something abhorrent. I mostly see young girls protected and nurtured by their parents in my Catholic bubble, but the world is ever encroaching. It seeks to infect. For the sake of “empowerment,” women will betray their beauty and even their humanity. The rejection of God’s plan for femininity has created a monstrosity.

Fathers, guard your daughters. Model the protective love they should expect from men. Don’t ignore her insecurities, that might leave her seeking affirmation from boys who would use her. The greatest gift a man can give his daughter is to deliver her to the altar rail and the hand of her future husband with her heart whole and unpatched, her white dress a visible truth.

Nearly 60 years after I would have been age-qualified for Bubble Inn, I yearn to have an 8-year-old heart again, to be defined by joy. That is a work for God. More essential for us is the work of rewriting our cultural script for girls, so that they may preserve what is most dear in their 8-year-old selves and carry it through to adulthood without all the damage and defensive accretions.

That would be a blessed and fitting memorial for the girls of Camp Mystic.