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Concept
Sacrilege
Summary
Sacrilege is the violation or injurious treatment of a sacred object, site or person. This can take the form of irreverence to sacred persons, places, and things. When the sacrilegious offence is verbal, it is called blasphemy, and when physical, it is often called desecration. In a less proper sense, any transgression against what is seen as the virtue of religion would be a sacrilege, and so is coming near a sacred site without permission.
Most ancient religions have a concept analogous to sacrilege, often considered as a type of taboo. The basic idea is that realm of sacrum or haram stands above the world of the profane and its instantiations, see the Sacred–profane dichotomy.
The term "sacrilege" originates from the Latin sacer, meaning sacred, and legere, meaning to steal. In Roman times, it referred to the plundering of temples and graves. By the time of Cicero, sacrilege had adopted a more expansive meaning, including verbal offences against religion and the undignified treatment of sacred objects.
Owing to the phonetic similarities between the words sacrilegious and religious, and their spiritually-based uses in modern English, many people mistakenly assume that the two words are etymologically linked, or that one is an antonym of the other. Religious is derived from the Latin word religio, meaning "reverence, religion", (from religare, "to bind [to the god{s}]"; Tully derived it from re- [again] and legere [to read]), whereas sacrilegious is derived ultimately from the Latin combining form sacr-, meaning sacred, and the verb legere, meaning "to steal", "to collect", or "to read". The Latin noun sacrilegus thus means "one who steals sacred things".1
With the advent of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Theodosius criminalized sacrilege in an even more expansive sense, including heresy, schism, and offenses against the emperor, such as tax evasion.
By the Middle Ages, the concept of sacrilege was again restricted to physical acts against sacred objects, and this forms the basis of all subsequent Catholic teachings on the subject.
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