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Puerto Rico’s government has taken the name and image of Roberto Clemente for its own promotional ends, offering neither license nor compensation to those who hold lawful rights in that property.
The commonwealth acts as the classic Dispossessor, treating a man’s posthumous likeness as a resource to be commandeered rather than a stewardship to be respected.
Such seizures echo the long record of rulers who, from the late medieval period onward, began to claim private holdings under the banner of public necessity while eroding the very notion of ownership under God.
Christian tradition, anchored in the eighth commandment and the common-law inheritance of the West, has always recognized that property originates in divine order and human labor, not in the fiat of magistrates.
Once likeness itself is declared fair game for state use, the boundary between citizen and subject dissolves and every household stands exposed to further extraction.
The Supreme Court therefore faces a straightforward duty: either restrain the commonwealth’s hand or ratify its expansion into the very image of the citizen.
Faithful men must now insist that the court apply the takings clause without favor, and they must prepare parallel legal and cultural institutions that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of such appropriations.
Property defended today preserves the ground upon which future households can stand.
