Definition of "desecration"

It seemed a desecration and an unhallowed thing to touch that sleeping image of the live man by my side.

1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887

In the same year as the Furness objection, sadder tidings befell St Pancras Priory at Lewes, in East Sussex. Despite it having the distinction of being the earliest Cluniac monastery in Great Britain, petitions to prevent the Brighton Lewes & Hastings Railway from imposing on its site with its Lewes line failed. The line was approved and, as if as an act of deliberate desecration and assertion of the railways' power, passed over the site of the high altar.

2022 January 12, Dr. Joseph Brennan, “Castles: ruined and redeemed by rail”, in RAIL, number 948, page 57