Sacrilege is irreverence toward a sacred person, place, or thing. Sacrilege occurs when someone purposefully misuses a consecrated object, desecrates a hallowed place, or speaks in an irreverent manner of something related to God or religion. The word has Latin roots: sacer (“sacred”) and legere (“to steal”). At first the term sacrilege likely referred to acts of grave robbers who desecrated tombs but has come to refer to any “stealing” of sacredness from a religious place, object, or person.