JD Vance did a bold thing on Sunday by calling out the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and asking them how Catholic Charities is really operating with the scores of millions of dollars it receives to help immigrants in this country.

A number of progressive priests took umbrage at this, suggesting that Vance was rejecting church teaching on “welcoming the stranger.” Far from it. The popes — from Pius XII to John Paul II to Benedict XVI, and even Pope Francis in more candid moments — have all affirmed the right of sovereign nations to restrict and limit migration and refugee claims.

The issue that needs to be discussed is how Catholic Charities approaches its work. Informing people of their basic legal rights is an absolutely legitimate work of mercy. Teaching migrants how to evade the application of just laws to their actual circumstances is not.

In many communities, Catholic Charities is just one nonprofit node embedded in a giant network of people and institutions with a financial stake in continued illegal immigration. Often there is a regional coordinating nongovernmental organization that puts together cross-institutional efforts to provide illegal aliens with legal representation and to connect them to housing and to employers willing to hire people off the books. Churches and lawyers have certain forms of legal privilege to act in ways others do not. If and when Catholic Charities works with these groups, they may be spreading the fog of lawlessness over the land, even when they themselves are following the letter of the law. Many of the people involved do this deliberately because they think laws that distinguish between native and foreigner are inherently unjust. But it’s precisely in this legal gray zone that people get exploited — by their landlords, by employers, or, on the other side of the border, by human and drug traffickers.