Sacrilege

We live in a secular age, and I think it may be hard for many people to understand the gravity of what Donald Trump has done by pretending to dress himself in the pope's clothes.

Sacrilege is a word you don't hear much anymore. One definition is "gross irreverence toward a hallowed person, place, or thing" (Merriam-Webster). Synonyms include blasphemy, defilement, profanation.

Recently I was working on an article about eighteenth-century France, and I came across a story about a young man who did much less that Donald Trump has just done:

Back in everyday France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes meant that the government would persecute people who did not toe the Catholic line. Professor Darnton provides a vivid picture of what this oppression could look like on an individual level. This example is actually from the reign of Louis XV: "Francois-Jean, Chevalier de la Barre, was convicted of blasphemy and sacrilege in 1765. He had failed to take off his hat when a religious procession with the Eucharist passed by in a street in Abbeville, and according to a rumor, he and other feckless young men had desecrated a cross. ... He was condemned to have his tongue cut out, to be beheaded, and to have his body burned on a bonfire... ." In the end, the excision of the tongue was removed from the menu of butchery, but the rest of the sentence was carried out. 

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