Abstract. An old student joke in Rome—whether someone could become a Jesuit without baptism—developed into an inquiry into legal validity, institutional membership and the authority to use “S.J.”. I reconstruct that development through a dialogue with an AI assistant, checked against the Latin and Eastern Codes, Jesuit proper law, institutional reports and canonical scholarship. The decisive opening was the distinction between an unlawful admission and an invalid one: canon 10 gives grounds for questioning whether every breach of Catholic eligibility necessarily nullifies admission. That argument has scholarly support in the narrower case of baptized non-Catholics. Extending it to an unbaptized person, however, requires resolving questions of capacity and the constitutive conditions of religious membership. Challenges to a Claretian manual, documentary examples and the interpretation of omitted clauses progressively changed the inquiry. No verified route to canonical Jesuit novice status and legitimate use of the initials without baptism was established. The contribution is a reconstruction of how the question became more exact, including the remaining catechumen hypothesis, without treating either speculative permission or an unproved claim of absolute impossibility as a conclusion.
Keywords: canon law; Society of Jesus; baptism; juridic validity; legal capacity; legal interpretation; human–AI inquiry.
When I was studying in Rome, some of us used to joke about whether it might be possible to become a Jesuit without being baptized, or at least without being Catholic. Returning to that question in a conversation with an AI assistant, I found myself considerably less willing to accept an easy answer. If the ordinary route was closed, could some exceptional provision, historical privilege, distinction between kinds of membership, or carefully interpreted omission produce a different result?
I kept asking the assistant to go further. A baptized Protestant was an interesting case, but it still left baptism untouched. An Eastern Catholic Jesuit widened the picture of Catholic belonging without reaching the boundary I wanted to examine. Eventually I narrowed the practical question to two letters: could someone who had never been validly baptized nevertheless be entitled to place “S.J.” after their name, with those letters genuinely referring to the Catholic Society of Jesus? This was a change in the objective. If full religious membership was too demanding, perhaps the initials belonged to an earlier stage, or to some other recognized relationship with the Society. I was trying to find the smallest result that would still count as a real answer to the joke.
At that point, I was much less interested in classifying the obstacles than in finding a way through them. Human legislation contains exceptions and awkward boundaries; surely, I kept suggesting, there must be something here. That insistence explains the direction of the conversation, but it cannot serve as evidence for its conclusion. Looking back, I need to preserve both facts: I repeatedly pushed against answers that seemed to end the search too quickly, and I had not demonstrated that the solution I wanted existed. The more careful distinctions in this article emerged through those exchanges. They were not the framework with which I began. There were also two different senses of progress in my questions. Going further meant reaching a case more distant from ordinary Catholic membership; coming nearer meant finding a more defensible way of obtaining the designation. A baptized Protestant could be nearer in the second sense while remaining insufficiently interesting in the first. Recognizing that tension helps explain why an answer that advanced the legal analysis could still leave me asking the assistant to try again.
The inquiry has not established such an entitlement. What it has produced is a more exact understanding of the problem, including several corrections to the assistant’s reasoning and to the expectations I brought to the search. Its most consequential discovery concerns a distinction that initially seemed almost too convenient: an action can violate a legal requirement and still produce a valid legal effect. Understanding why that is possible, and why it does not automatically solve the Jesuit case, changed the character of the investigation.
The question concealed in the initials
The original joke compressed several different questions. Being unbaptized, being baptized outside the Catholic Church, and being Catholic without belonging to the Latin Church are different conditions. The Code itself distinguishes baptismal incorporation from full Catholic communion. Moving from a Latin to an Eastern Catholic context therefore does not, by itself, remove the baptismal question (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 204–205). I had asked whether the Church’s internal diversity might provide a route around the apparent restriction. The first task was to avoid mistaking a change of ecclesial category for the removal of the condition under examination.
“Becoming a Jesuit” also needed unpacking. Admission to a preparatory community, canonical admission as a novice, incorporation through religious profession, and recognition through an honorary designation cannot simply be substituted for one another. Canon 646 concerns the beginning of life in an institute through the novitiate; canon 654 concerns incorporation through religious profession. The Jesuit Constitutions, meanwhile, include novices within the Society in the broadest sense of membership (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 646, 654); (Society of Jesus, n.d.-b, §511). The vocabulary contained distinctions that the initial question had hidden.
There was a further distinction within the Society itself: Jesuit membership did not mean priesthood. Complementary Norm 6 includes novices destined to become either priests or brothers, as well as later forms of membership (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 6). An argument about the prerequisites for ordination would therefore leave the brother’s vocation and the novice’s position insufficiently examined. This mattered whenever a seemingly decisive sacramental example entered the discussion. It might illuminate a principle without deciding the institutional status we were actually testing.
The initials made those distinctions more pressing. My criterion was recognized use of “S.J.” in relation to the Society, rather than the mere physical possibility of adding letters to a signature. A civil-law question about someone’s chosen name would have changed the subject. Yet moving to the initials did not automatically simplify the investigation. We now had to establish both the relevant relationship with the Society and the basis on which that relationship justified the designation. Evidence that the letters were actually used would need to be distinguished from a rule establishing who was entitled to use them. My expression “valid S.J.” consequently needed translating. Strictly speaking, validity concerned the admission or another relevant juridic act; the use of the letters concerned the designation that followed from a recognized relationship or authorization. Treating the initials themselves as though they were the juridic act could hide a missing step. Even a successful argument about admission would still have to explain what that success allowed the person to claim publicly.
A Jesuit report of a November 2025 event at Deusto identified Fernando Peredo as both a first-year novice and “S.J.” That was useful evidence against an overly categorical claim that the initials could appear only after first vows. It documented institutional usage, although it did not establish a universal rule governing every novice or every exceptional admission (Jesuitas Loyola, 2025). The correction mattered because it kept the novice stage within the inquiry. Its evidential effect was asymmetric: it could challenge a universal claim excluding novices, while doing much less to establish the entitlement of a hypothetical unbaptized novice. This was one of several occasions when removing an obstacle to a question did not yet supply an answer.
Another case sharpened the distinction between recognition and validity. In 2020, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City reported that Zachary Boazman, already serving as a priest, discovered that his infant baptism had been invalid. He subsequently received baptism and ordination validly. This was a diocesan case, not a Jesuit precedent (Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, 2020). Its relevance was limited but instructive: public recognition can precede discovery of a defect in the underlying status. An analogous hypothetical involving someone publicly styled “S.J.” would therefore require further analysis. Honest usage under an undetected mistake would not, by itself, prove that the membership had been valid.
When a prohibited admission might still take effect
The discussion became more substantial when the assistant introduced the possibility of an admission that was “valid despite being unlawful.” I returned to that formulation because it appeared to change what counted as a successful route. If the act really produced a legal status, perhaps the violation did not defeat the result I was trying to obtain. My next question was whether such validity would therefore be usable. But the assistant’s original formulation contained a conditional claim, and “might be valid” could not quietly become “would be valid.” Nor was validity a compromise category meaning approximately acceptable. A valid but illicit act has the relevant legal effect while still violating the law. The distinction opened a serious line of inquiry; it did not itself decide which admissions belonged within it.
The strongest textual argument we assembled rested on five provisions:
- Canon 597 §1 identifies Catholics meeting the relevant conditions as candidates who can be admitted, without separately stating a nullity consequence for admission outside that category.
- Canon 643 §1 lists invalidating impediments to novitiate admission without separately listing absence of baptism.
- Canon 645 §1 requires evidence of baptism, confirmation and free status, without expressly making documentary omission an invalidating defect.
- Jesuit Complementary Norm 27 retains no additional proper impediments invalidating admission beyond universal law.
- Canon 10 requires express establishment of invalidating or disqualifying effects.
These are textual observations whose significance depends on how the provisions operate together (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 10, 597, 643–645); (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 27). The proposed conclusion was that an otherwise valid admission might remain effective even if it breached the Catholic eligibility requirement. Extending that conclusion to an unbaptized person would require a further argument.
My difficulty with this argument eventually centred on the word “eligible.” If canon 597 identifies the people who may be admitted, why should admitting someone outside that category not simply fail? The answer proposed in the conversation was that a legal requirement can direct the superior’s lawful conduct without necessarily depriving a contrary act of effect. Ineligibility for lawful admission and incapacity to acquire a status are therefore propositions that require separate examination. That distinction made the argument intelligible to me. It also sharpened the unresolved question: which kind of requirement was Catholic status, and would absence of baptism belong to the same category?
The distinction underlying this proposal is established in canonical analysis. Patricia Smith explains that lawfulness and validity answer different questions: whether an act complies with the law, and whether it produces its intended effect. Canon 10 contributes to legal certainty by preventing every violation from automatically becoming a reason to treat an act as null (Smith, 2008). A system can preserve the effects of an act while maintaining that the act should not have been performed.
There was also a concrete Jesuit illustration. Complementary Norm 28 §1, 6° treats admission of a candidate who has completed fifty years of age without the Superior General’s permission as illicit. Read with Norm 27, it illustrates a requirement governing lawful admission without adding a proper invalidating impediment, assuming the other validity requirements are satisfied (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 27–28). This example did not resolve baptism. It showed why the general distinction could not simply be dismissed as verbal ingenuity.
The conversation then found scholarly support for the narrower non-Catholic case. Jobe Abbass, comparing the Latin and Eastern Codes, identifies the absence of an express Catholic-status invalidity provision in the relevant Latin canons and invokes canon 10 as a basis for an argument against disqualification. He proposes legislative clarification. His discussion also records that the Eastern drafting debate concerned baptized Orthodox and Protestant candidates (Abbass, 2010, pp. 21–24). I had encountered an existing canonical argument; I had not discovered an unprecedented defect in the legislation.
The Eastern comparison was revealing for another reason. Eastern canon 450, 1° expressly excludes non-Catholics from valid admission to the novitiate, with canon 517 §1 extending the relevant rule to orders and congregations (Catholic Church, 1990, cann. 450, 517). Looking east therefore supplied a sharper contrast in drafting, rather than the wider permission I had initially hoped to find.
Abbass’s account also preserved a concrete reason for the Eastern clarification: an Orthodox candidate might spend time in a Catholic monastery while discerning a vocation, yet that residence was to be distinguished from canonical admission to the novitiate (Abbass, 2010, pp. 22–23). This made the distinction between presence and membership less abstract. The comparison did not let an applicant select whichever Code supplied a preferred result. The Latin Code’s own first canon defines its scope; our proposed case deliberately stipulated Latin law (Catholic Church, 1983, can. 1). An actual case would still require identifying the law governing the institute, the candidate and the particular act.
Still, a published argument remained an argument. Abbass did not supply a verified admission of an unbaptized Jesuit, a binding interpretation of the Latin provisions, or authorization to use the initials. The point at which the discussion became academically recognizable was also the point at which its limits needed more careful protection. A scholarly source could establish that the narrower interpretation deserved examination without establishing that the wider result I wanted followed from it.
Rereading the original AI hypothesis reveals the step that my repeated demands risked skipping. It concerned a validly baptized Protestant, admitted by a competent superior under Latin law, with the other requirements satisfied. Baptism was being held fixed while Catholic communion was varied. My question—could we go further and remove baptism too?—changed another premise. The phrase “with the other requirements satisfied” could no longer carry the argument, because whether an unbaptized person satisfied the underlying conditions of capacity was precisely what we needed to determine. This did not refute the proposed extension. It showed why the extension needed its own proof.
Why the Claretian source needed to be challenged
One of the most useful interruptions came when the assistant relied on the Claretians’ formation manual. I asked why a document belonging to another religious congregation should settle a Jesuit question. That objection was not simply a demand for a more convenient source. It concerned the kind of authority being claimed.
The manual states that an unbaptized person, including a catechumen, cannot validly be admitted to consecrated life. The relevant passage appears under requirements attributed to universal law, and its supporting footnote refers to canon 597 (Claretian Missionaries, n.d., ch. 18, III.1.2 and n. 17). This meant that the text could not be dismissed as wholly irrelevant: it was offering an interpretation of a canon applicable beyond the Claretians. Equally, its institutional provenance did not turn that interpretation into Jesuit proper law or an authoritative settlement of the disputed point.
The question “could the Jesuits be different?” nevertheless had a precise legal basis. Canon 643 §2 permits an institute’s proper law to add admission impediments, including ones affecting validity. The Society’s Norm 27 says that it retains none beyond universal law (Catholic Church, 1983, can. 643 §2); (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 27). Differences between institutes therefore could matter. But the Claretian passage presented its conclusion as universal, so its relevance turned on the interpretation it offered, not simply on which congregation published it. Conversely, the Jesuit provision removed an additional layer of impediments; it did not erase the universal requirements to which it expressly referred.
The assistant’s reliance on the manual therefore needed to be narrowed. It was evidence that a formation text read the universal requirement as affecting validity. It was not sufficient proof that this reading controlled the Jesuit case. The footnote made the difficulty especially clear: it sent us back to canon 597, the very provision whose legal effect we were questioning. Repeating the manual’s conclusion could not replace explaining how that conclusion followed from the canon. My objection changed the work the source could do. It remained part of the evidence, but it could no longer function as an answer that brought the inquiry to an end.
The same discipline had to apply to the source that favoured the more permissive argument. I could not demand a binding authority from the Claretian text and then treat Abbass’s scholarly proposal as though it already had that status. Both sources had to be identified accurately. One offered institutional formation guidance containing a legal interpretation; the other developed a comparative scholarly argument. Their disagreement, or apparent tension, was a reason to examine the underlying law more closely.
This changed how I understood verification. Finding an official-looking publication was not enough. I needed to know whether it legislated, interpreted, instructed, described practice, or proposed reform. A source could be reliable about what its author maintained while remaining insufficient to establish the legal conclusion I wanted. The Society’s own documents support making that distinction. Complementary Norm 7 distinguishes laws properly so called from documents that explain spirituality, ways of proceeding or legitimate traditions (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 7). Even a Jesuit document would therefore need to be read for the kind of authority it exercised. Replacing a Claretian source with a Jesuit source would improve institutional relevance without automatically settling its legal force.
I had also asked whether this amounted to a serious study of canon law. By this stage, the answer could be specified without exaggerating the result. The inquiry crossed the law of consecrated life, the general rules governing juridic acts, the Society’s proper law and comparative interpretation of the Latin and Eastern Codes. Its seriousness depended on keeping those levels distinct, identifying the authority of each source and acknowledging missing premises. It did not depend on eventually discovering a loophole. That was a change from the earlier tendency to measure every answer by whether it brought the desired initials closer.
What the missing word could and could not prove
The five-point argument initially encouraged a simple reading: if the relevant provision did not say “invalid,” perhaps invalidity could not follow. That reading was attractive because it appeared to turn the search into a checkable textual exercise. The later discussion qualified it. Smith explains that the canonical meaning of “expressly” is not confined to a provision containing a particular word; an effect may be expressed explicitly or implicitly and may require connected provisions to be read together (Smith, 2008). Searching for a missing word was therefore an inadequate method of identifying all the law’s consequences. But the correction needed limits of its own: allowing connected provisions to supply a consequence did not license an interpreter to infer invalidity merely because a requirement seemed important.
Canon 124 §1 supplies general requirements for valid juridic acts, including a qualified person and the act’s essential constituents. Canon 127 supplies validity consequences where the law requires a superior to obtain consent or seek counsel (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 124, 127). Such requirements need not be restated in every provision governing a particular act. An exhaustive list of special admission impediments could still coexist with general requirements that affect the validity of admission.
That observation exposed a missing premise. To succeed, the permissive argument had to establish that baptism was not an underlying condition of capacity for the particular status being created. It could not establish this merely by pointing to its absence from one list. But the restrictive argument also had work to do. Calling baptism “essential” did not explain why it was essential to canonical novice admission at that precise stage. The classification itself was what needed to be justified.
The broader statutory framework supported the restrictive reading. Canon 96 connects baptism with incorporation and Christian rights and duties; canon 204 identifies the Christian faithful through baptism; canon 573 situates consecrated life among the faithful (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 96, 204, 573). These provisions gave a legal basis for reading religious membership within a baptismal framework. Invoking them was not an arbitrary appeal to religious sentiment outside the legislation. The legislation itself contains those ecclesiological commitments.
Yet this could easily become too sweeping. An unbaptized person is not incapable of every act recognized by canon law. Canon 1476 allows a person to bring an action whether baptized or not, while canon 206 gives catechumens a special relationship with the Church and certain Christian prerogatives (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 1476, 206). These provisions defeated an overbroad explanation of exclusion. They did not establish capacity to acquire Jesuit novice status. That difference mattered to the history of the argument: showing why one impossibility proof failed was intellectually useful, but it did not prove possibility. The question had to concern capacity for this particular act and status, rather than canonical standing in the abstract.
Rechecking the general norms adds another test of the same distinction. Canon 11 limits the personal obligations imposed by merely ecclesiastical laws to the Catholics it specifies (Catholic Church, 1983, can. 11). An unbaptized applicant’s position outside that ordinary reach does not itself create a power to acquire every Catholic institutional status. Nor does it release a Catholic superior from the law governing admission. The proposed inference would confuse who is personally bound to obey a rule with what an institution can validly confer. This is a further check on the argument, rather than a claim that the earlier conversation had already exhausted this avenue.
Another distinction separated evidence from the fact it was meant to establish. Failure to produce a baptismal certificate is different from never having been validly baptized. The proposed argument about the documentary requirement could not silently become an argument that the underlying baptismal condition was dispensable. A missing record, uncertainty about a past event, and certainty that the event never occurred are different cases.
Theological alternatives required similar restraint. The Catechism distinguishes the fruits associated with baptism of blood and desire from reception of the sacrament itself. That teaching did not provide a rule authorizing Jesuit membership (Catholic Church, 1997, §§1258–1260). Conditional baptism also changed the problem: where baptism had not previously occurred, its valid administration would supply it. It would not create a person who remained unbaptized while acquiring a baptismal qualification.
A 2025 explanatory note from the Dicastery for Legislative Texts expressly identifies perpetual religious profession among commitments requiring baptism. Its subject is the preservation of baptismal records, however, and it does not directly adjudicate the hypothetical admission of an unbaptized novice (Dicastery for Legislative Texts, 2025). This was stronger evidence about profession than about every preliminary stage. Its force depended on keeping its scope intact.
Jesuit proper law also corrected one of the more tempting routes. The broad membership language of Constitution §511 had encouraged exploration of probation as a category that might avoid the ordinary novice question. Complementary Norm 6 §2, however, states: “All candidates are now first admitted as novices.” Norm 31 still provides for first probation, so the correction was not that this stage had disappeared. It was that we lacked a basis for treating it as an independent membership route free of the admission problem (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 6 §2, 31). The original constitutional wording retained its significance for the breadth of Jesuit belonging. What had to be withdrawn was the unproved inference that its breadth supplied a current exception to the conditions of entry.
When the mathematical analogy became more exact
I had repeatedly described the inquiry as something like a mathematical problem. The attraction was clear: identify the requirements, test the boundary cases, and either construct a solution or demonstrate why the constraints exclude it. When successive answers still left the desired case unproved, I asked whether we had reached an absolute limitation. If no solution could be found, perhaps one had to be constructed. The analogy helped expose assumptions, but it also encouraged an expectation that enough ingenuity must eventually produce a satisfying result. Neither mathematics nor law guarantees that a requested construction exists; in both, the conditions of the problem matter.
A small formal distinction helps explain the issue. Let \(L(a)\) mean that an act is lawful and \(V(a)\) that it is valid. The distinction we were examining permits the following:
\[
\neg L(a)\;\not\Rightarrow\;\neg V(a).
\]
Unlawfulness does not, by itself, entail invalidity. But this expression does not say that every unlawful act is valid. Nor does it identify which defects affect validity in a particular case. The symbols clarify the separation between two questions; they do not answer the disputed classification on which the Jesuit example depends.
The wording of canon 597 raised a related difficulty. Read as an isolated logical conditional, a statement that qualified Catholics can be admitted does not by itself settle every case involving someone outside that category. Legal drafting, however, cannot simply be reduced to that conditional: the provision may identify the class for which a legal institution is available, direct a superior’s conduct, or operate alongside rules establishing capacity. The attraction of the mathematical analogy was its insistence on justified inference. Its limitation appeared when the legal function of a sentence was treated as already settled by its grammatical form. That function was part of what we were investigating.
At one stage the assistant warned that “failure to derive a prohibition from a selected group of provisions is not yet a derivation of permission.” I found the formulation interesting enough to ask what deeper view of law it involved. Yet the subsequent analysis had to qualify the warning itself. Canon 10 gives the absence of an established invalidating effect a legal significance that bare silence would not possess. The five-point argument therefore could not be dismissed as merely finding something the text happened not to mention. The assistant’s methodological caution had become another proposition to test. Its useful part survived: the selected provisions might be incomplete. Its overly general implication—that absence could do no affirmative legal work—had to be resisted.
The more exact question became whether we had found silence across the relevant legal framework, or merely silence in the paragraph we were examining. A default rule can supply a legal consequence when a specific provision is silent. A general rule can also supply a consequence that the specific provision does not repeat. Both possibilities have to be considered before identifying a loophole.
This led to three possible classifications. The Catholic eligibility requirement might govern lawfulness alone, leaving an otherwise valid admission effective. The omitted condition might already be supplied by the legal framework, making repetition unnecessary. Or the relationship between the provisions might remain genuinely disputed. These possibilities explained why my question—was this a loophole, an interpretation, or something else?—could not be answered merely by pointing again to the omission. An omission becomes a usable legal opening only through an account of its effect within the system. “Loophole” risked naming the result I hoped for before we had established the interpretation required to reach it.
A further check concerns doubt itself. Canon 14 provides that even invalidating or disqualifying ecclesiastical laws do not oblige in a doubt of law; Jesuit Norm 29 contains a corresponding provision for prohibitions arising from the Society’s own law (Catholic Church, 1983, can. 14); (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 29). These provisions prevent us from treating legal uncertainty as automatically irrelevant. But an unanswered question in our discussion does not by itself establish the kind of doubt to which the rule applies. A proposed route would have to identify the doubtful law, substantiate the doubt and explain why the obstacle fell within that rule’s operation. Otherwise, “we have not resolved this” would become “the requirement does not bind” without the necessary argument.
There was also a difference between permission to act and power to create a legal status. The absence of a prohibition against writing letters after a name cannot itself supply membership in an institution. A status-dependent designation requires a legally relevant basis. This remained true even if the rule governing admission turned out to preserve the effects of an unlawful act.
The law’s interpretive provisions became part of the reasoning rather than obstacles to a supposedly pure textual solution. Canon 17 requires attention to text and context, with further interpretive resources where meaning remains doubtful. Canon 19 provides a method for addressing gaps. Canon 6 §2 requires attention to canonical tradition where provisions repeat earlier law (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 6 §2, 17, 19). Asking for an answer based only on law could not reasonably exclude the law’s own instructions about how it was to be understood.
The legal tradition behind the argument
This was why I eventually asked whether canon law belonged to the civil-law tradition, the common-law tradition, or a system of its own. The question followed from a practical difficulty: what sort of reasoning was I entitled to use? Was an omitted clause decisive? Could a general principle supply what a list omitted? What authority did a scholar’s interpretation have? The movement into legal history came from those difficulties. I had asked for an answer based on law and regulation alone; now I needed to understand what counted as a legal argument in the system whose boundaries I was testing.
A useful description is that Catholic canon law is a distinct ecclesial legal order with deep roots in the Romano-canonical tradition. Roman and canon law helped form the learned European tradition commonly described as the ius commune. Kenneth Pennington emphasizes the shared jurisprudence through which jurists worked with inherited texts, concepts and principles. The term should not simply be identified with English common law (Pennington, 2024). Canon law’s codified form has affinities with civil-law systems, but a binary classification leaves much of its particular character unexplained.
“The law of the Vatican” also concealed a distinction. Vatican City has a territorial legal system whose law on sources recognizes canon law as its primary normative source and interpretive reference, alongside Vatican legislation and supplementary reception of Italian legislation under specified conditions (Benedict XVI, 2008, arts. 1–3). The question of Jesuit membership belonged to the Church’s legal order and the Society’s proper law. It was not principally a question about the territorial state.
Nor could a persuasive interpretation simply be treated as a new rule. Canon 16 distinguishes authentic interpretation from interpretation in an individual judgment or administrative act; the latter does not acquire general legislative force (Catholic Church, 1983, can. 16). This did not make scholarly reasoning irrelevant. It clarified the difference between defending an interpretation, obtaining a decision in a concrete case, and establishing a generally binding legal position.
The mathematical analogy consequently became more demanding. Logical consistency remained necessary, but the premises included questions of source, competence, context and authoritative interpretation. The task was not completed when an attractive conclusion could be made to follow from a carefully chosen subset of provisions. We had to justify the selection and interpretation of those provisions as well.
Constructing permission without pretending to have found it
When an existing exception remained elusive, I asked whether a solution could be constructed. Here the conversation initially risked a false choice between finding permission already available and rewriting the law. A legal system can authorize an institution to make an individual decision that changes someone’s position without changing the general legislation.
Canon law contains mechanisms for privileges, rescripts and dispensations. Canon 76 concerns privileges granted by a legislator or an empowered executive authority. Canons 85–86 distinguish dispensation from merely ecclesiastical law from requirements defining essential constituents of juridic institutes or acts (Catholic Church, 1983, cann. 76, 85–86). The existence of these mechanisms was relevant, but it did not prove that the particular favour we wanted could be granted.
Canon 60 makes the distinction between requesting and receiving especially concrete: those not expressly prohibited may request a rescript (Catholic Church, 1983, can. 60). That is relevant to my demand for a construction within existing law, since the system provides procedures through which a particular favour can be sought. Yet an available procedure is not evidence that every requested result lies within an authority’s competence. For the proposed Jesuit case, a petition would need to specify whether it sought admission, a dispensation, honorary recognition or permission concerning a designation. Asking vaguely for an exception would conceal the very distinctions on which its legal possibility depended.
Jesuit law supplied a concrete example of a genuine exception: Complementary Norm 24 §3 records a privilege under which the Superior General can validly admit candidates below the ordinary minimum age of seventeen (Society of Jesus, n.d.-a, CN 24 §3). This was what an established exception looked like: an identifiable authority, a particular condition and a specified effect. Its existence gave no automatic warrant for extending it to baptism.
I therefore needed to distinguish three projects. Interpretation would argue that existing law already produced the desired result. An individual concession would use an existing legal power to create a particular authorization. Legislative reform would change the general rule. The middle possibility mattered because my request had been for a way within existing law, and a new individual decision need not be new general legislation. Yet the possibility of requesting such a decision would not establish a right to receive it, still less that the authority had power to grant this particular favour. Each project required its own account of the power being exercised.
A documented honorary case gives that distinction a concrete setting. In its spring 2018 magazine, St. John’s Jesuit High School and Academy reported that province approval had been obtained to name Fr. Dan Zak an honorary Jesuit. The report identified him as a priest who had served in the Diocese of Toledo (St. John’s Jesuit High School and Academy, 2018, p. 14). This supports treating honorary recognition as a real institutional practice rather than a wholly invented category. It supplies no example of an unbaptized recipient, however, and says nothing establishing a right to append “S.J.”. Even here, the exact object of the recognition mattered.
An honorary permission to use the initials, if it could lawfully be created by a competent authority, would belong to this discussion as a separate proposal. It would require an account of what the permission meant and what status, if any, accompanied it. We found no verified concession authorizing an unbaptized person to use “S.J.” in the sense I was investigating. Referring generally to papal power could not replace identifying the competence, object and limits of a particular grant. This possibility also exposed a tension in my reduced objective. If recognized initials alone were sufficient, a genuine honorary authorization might answer that narrower request. It would still leave the original membership question unanswered. An honest account would have to state what had been obtained and what the letters represented. The fact that two routes ended in the same typography would not make the resulting relationships with the Society equivalent.
This was a consequential qualification to my demand for creativity. A construction had to make its change of assumptions visible. A hypothetical new permission could not be presented as an overlooked entitlement already possessed by the applicant. Conversely, using a recognized power to issue a new individual authorization would not necessarily mean abandoning the existing legal system. The distinction depended on what that system actually empowered the authority to do.
A narrower case and a more exact burden of proof
The most focused unresolved case returned to an example I had raised earlier: the catechumen. I had initially offered it while asking whether we could go further than the baptized Protestant. After the distinctions about capacity, membership and stages of formation had been developed, the same suggestion could be formulated more carefully. The assistant helped make timing central: could a properly prepared catechumen be admitted as a canonical Jesuit novice before baptism, with baptism occurring before religious profession? The example had returned with a more exact question attached to it: which legal act would occur before baptism, and what effect could it produce?
This formulation separated the preliminary status from the later commitment. It also avoided relying on a hidden defect, a mistaken certificate or a ceremonial label. The hypothetical superior would know the candidate’s condition. The question would be whether the law could recognize that candidate as a novice at that time. A future intention to receive baptism would not be treated as though baptism had already occurred. Equally, “unbaptized at admission” was a narrower target than “able to remain unbaptized throughout Jesuit religious life.” If this construction ever succeeded, its temporal limitation would have to remain explicit. Otherwise, narrowing the problem could manufacture the appearance of having solved the original, stronger one.
The timing also generated a further question. If baptism occurred later, could it repair an earlier defective admission, or would a new admission or another legally effective act be needed? Our hypothesis could not assume retrospective validation merely because the candidate eventually became baptized. Likewise, time spent preparing for religious life would have to be distinguished from time legally counted as a novitiate. These were consequences to investigate, not additional solutions already available. The temporal construction was useful because it isolated an earlier stage; it could not be allowed to hide the legal transitions between stages.
The narrower case did not make the obstacle disappear. Catechumens’ recognized relationship with the Church does not itself confer every status available to the baptized. The profession-related evidence likewise could not, without further argument, be treated as a complete answer about novice admission. What remained to be established was the source and operation of the baptismal requirement at that earlier stage.
A concrete statutory example helps specify what the catechumen’s special relationship can mean. Canon 1183 §1 counts catechumens among the Christian faithful for funerals (Catholic Church, 1983, can. 1183 §1). Here the law gives an unbaptized person a defined treatment associated with the faithful without pretending that sacramental baptism has occurred. That makes the search for a legally recognized position before baptism intelligible. Its limitation is equally precise: a provision about funerals is not a general equivalence for every canonical purpose. For novice admission, we would need an applicable basis for that further consequence. The example supplies a model of bounded legal recognition, not the missing admission rule.
For the particular route through novice membership, I can state the target more precisely. Let \(B(x)\) mean that a person is validly baptized, \(N(x)\) that the person has validly acquired canonical novice status in the Society, and \(S(x)\) that the person is authorized to use “S.J.” in the relevant institutional sense. The proposed case would require:
\[
\exists x\,\bigl(\neg B(x)\land N(x)\land S(x)\bigr).
\]
This is a description of the proposed result, not a proof that such a person can exist under current law. Establishing \(N(x)\) would require resolving the capacity and admission questions. Establishing \(S(x)\) would require a further basis for the designation, whether an applicable institutional rule, established usage or an individual authorization. The documented use of the initials for a novice does not establish that every conceivable valid novice admission carries the same entitlement.
The assistant’s eventual assessment was that the systematic case for excluding unbaptized candidates from ordinary canonical novitiate admission was stronger than the argument assembled from the omissions alone. That assessment must itself remain distinguishable from an authentic interpretation or a demonstration excluding every conceivable individual concession. The baptized non-Catholic case has identifiable scholarly support for a validity argument. Extending it to the unbaptized requires an additional premise that our investigation has not established.
I kept asking whether we had come any nearer. The answer depended on what “nearer” meant. The hypothesis had become more precise, and some inadequate reasons for rejecting it had been removed. Neither development established that a competent authority could validly act as proposed. Precision and evidential support can move separately: a clearer statement may expose how much remains unproved. The refinement was useful to the inquiry, but it did not fulfil my demand for a workable route. Preserving that difference prevents the history from acquiring a neat ending that the exchange itself did not produce.
What the AI-assisted inquiry changed
The division of intellectual work matters to this account. The Roman joke, the insistence on pushing beyond baptized Protestants, the interest in the initials, the catechumen proposal and the objection to the Claretian source came from my questions. The assistant helped articulate legal distinctions, locate materials, compare provisions and formulate increasingly specific hypotheses. Its outputs then became inputs to the next round: “valid despite being unlawful” led me to ask whether validity could be used; the provisional Protestant case led me to ask whether baptism could be removed; the warning about inference led me to ask what kind of legal system we were reasoning within. Some of the assistant’s formulations subsequently required qualification through the same inquiry they had helped advance.
My insistence that there must be some way was productive when it prevented an unsupported refusal from ending the inquiry. It also created a pressure that needed scrutiny. An assistant repeatedly asked to find a route can keep producing increasingly elaborate possibilities without obtaining stronger evidence. A new hypothetical, a narrower formulation and a verified exception are different kinds of progress. The conversation required us to keep separating them. The repeated pattern in my replies—interest in an explanation, followed by another objection—also needs to remain visible. Finding a distinction compelling did not mean accepting every conclusion the assistant attached to it. In particular, my continued questions about absolute limits should not be rewritten as assent to its eventual assessment of the stronger interpretation. The conversation established areas of agreement about how to formulate the problem while leaving the desired result and parts of its legal assessment unresolved.
The same scrutiny applied to restrictive answers. A fluent statement of impossibility could conceal an unsupported transfer from another institute’s manual, from profession to novice admission, or from baptismal incorporation to the claim that unbaptized people cannot perform any canonical act. The useful corrections worked in both directions. They prevented the search from turning either into a catalogue of imagined permissions or into a series of prohibitions whose foundations were never examined.
Reconstructing the exchange also creates a temptation of its own. Once the distinctions are available, it is easy to write as though I had been applying them consistently from the beginning. In fact, I often returned to the simpler demand that there must be a way. The more exact questions emerged because particular answers failed to settle that demand: which requirement is allegedly being bypassed; whether it governs lawfulness, capacity, validity, evidence or designation; which source establishes its effect; whether an exception exists or would have to be created; and whether the argument reaches the status I wanted. This is the order of understanding that a polished account can accidentally reverse.
I still have no verified basis for claiming that an unbaptized person can validly become a canonical Jesuit novice and legitimately append “S.J.” through that route. That evidential conclusion is narrower than a proof excluding every imaginable authorization, and it is much weaker than the positive result I kept asking the assistant to find. The next useful question concerns the source and legal operation of baptism as a condition of novice admission, together with the authority governing the initials. The two letters have not been secured. What the inquiry has made possible is a more exact account of what a successful argument would still have to establish, without turning an unfinished construction into a discovery.
References
Unless otherwise specified, canon numbers refer to the Latin Code of Canon Law. References to the Society’s Constitutions and Complementary Norms use the online texts published in Documenta Societatis Iesu. Undated institutional pages are identified as such; the legal and documentary materials were consulted during this inquiry, completed for this article on 31 October 2026.
Abbass, Jobe. 2010. “The Eastern Code: A Resource for the Revision of the Latin Code.” Iustitia 1 (1–2): 9–39, especially 21–24. Full article.
Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. 2020. “Oklahoma City priest ‘re-ordained’ after learning of invalid baptism.” 16 September. Archdiocesan report.
Benedict XVI. 2008. Legge sulle fonti del diritto, No. LXXI, 1 October, especially arts. 1–3. Official text.
Catholic Church. 1983. Code of Canon Law, as subsequently amended. Official online text: cann. 1–6; cann. 7–22; cann. 35–93; cann. 96–123; cann. 124–128; cann. 204–207; cann. 573–606; cann. 607–709; cann. 1166–1190; cann. 1400–1500.
Catholic Church. 1990. Codex Canonum Ecclesiarum Orientalium, especially cann. 450 and 517. Official Latin text.
Catholic Church. 1997. Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, especially §§1258–1260. The necessity of baptism.
Claretian Missionaries. n.d. “Chapter 18: Juridical Aspects of the Novitiate.” In Initiation into the Missionary Life: Manual for the Claretian Novice, especially III.1.2 and note 17. General Prefecture of Formation. Online chapter.
Dicastery for Legislative Texts. 2025. Nota esplicativa sul divieto di cancellazioni nel Registro parrocchiale dei Battesimi. 7 April, Prot. No. 18626/2025. Official explanatory note.
Jesuitas Loyola. 2025. “Diálogo sobre vocación y vida ignaciana.” Report of the event held on 27 November 2025. Institutional report.
Pennington, Ken. 2024. “Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Concepts of the Ius commune.” Clio@Themis 27. https://doi.org/10.4000/12qyo.
Smith, Patricia. 2008. “Canon Law—Precision and Certitude: Laws Governing Laws.” Health Progress 89 (5): 6–7. Full article.
St. John’s Jesuit High School and Academy. 2018. “Province Grants ‘Honorary Jesuit’ Status to Friend of SJJ.” Titan Topics, spring, p. 14. School magazine.
Society of Jesus. n.d.-a. Complementary Norms, especially CN 6–7, 24, 27–29 and 31. Documenta Societatis Iesu. Preamble; Part I.
Society of Jesus. n.d.-b. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, Part V, especially §§510–511. Documenta Societatis Iesu. Official online text.