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…
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