The new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines, announced on 30 March, allow women to use RU-486, known generically as mifepristone and by its brand name Mifeprex - later into their pregnancy and with fewer visits to a doctor. There is also concern that the loosened guidelines will allow non-physicians to dispense and prescribe the drug.

The FDA has lifted the upper limit for the use of mifepristone from seven weeks to up to 10 weeks into pregnancy. It claims the drug is safe and that women will benefit from having more time to decide whether to continue with their pregnancy.

But pro-lifers insist the drug is dangerous and that its extended use is motivated by financial and political gain. Some claim it is linked to the current presidential and congressional election campaigns as Republican and Democrat candidates seek support from women.

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, chairman of the US bishops' pro-life committee, has described the FDA's decision as irresponsible.

"The unofficial, off-label use of RU-486 is now the new normal, paving the way for the destruction of even more innocent lives, and putting women and girls at risk of all the life-changing effects of abortion," he said in a statement on 1 April.

"Far from wanting abortion to be 'rare', abortion advocates are celebrating this expanded use as opening an ever-widening door to abortion," he said.

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In an op-ed piece for the New York Daily News, Cardinal Dolan likened Mr Trump's views to a "virulent strain" of American "nativism".

"Nativists believed the immigrant to be dangerous, and that America was better off without them," the cardinal wrote.

Cardinal Dolan recalled how, before becoming a bishop, he taught American religious history to university students, dedicating a portion of the class to "the ugly phenomenon called nativism".

Cardinal Dolan described nativism with the same words as scholar and author Ray Allen Billington, calling it "organised, white, Protestant antagonism toward the Catholic immigrant".

He said that he is not telling anyone who they should vote for.

But he stressed that as a Catholic "I take seriously the Bible's teaching that we are to welcome the stranger, one of the most frequently mentioned moral imperatives in both the Old and New Testament".

"I wish I were in the college classroom again, so I could roll out my 'Trump card' to show the students that I was right. Nativism is alive, well - and apparently popular!"

Trump, in his speech launching his presidential campaign, had said that "the US has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. And these aren't the best and the finest".

"When Mexico sends its people they're not sending their best, they're sending people that have a lot of problems . . . they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people," Trump said.

In a June 28 interview with CNN, Trump spoke of making Mexico build a wall along the US - Mexican border, saying that a wall is needed in certain areas.

He said he would force Mexico to build the wall "because we give them a fortune".

Mr Trump is one of the contenders to be the Republican Party candidate for the presidency.

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Catholic News Agency

During an interview on CNN, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said: "The IRA claimed to be Catholic. They were baptised. They had a Catholic identity."

But, he continued, "what they were doing was a perversion of everything the Church stood for".

The cardinal said the Islamic State movement was in the midst of a "systematic, well-choreographed, very well-focussed attempt to eradicate the ancient Christian population of the Mid-East".

"You know the parallel I've drawn?" he added.

He went on to add that the Irish bishops "to their immense credit", said at the time that the IRA attackers who targeted homes or military installations were not Catholics.

Cardinal Dolan said that while the killers of Islamic State are Muslim in his eyes, they belong to a "particularly perverted form of Islam".

"These are not pure, these are not real Muslims," he explained.

"Now what we need and what Pope Francis has led the world in saying, is we need the temperate, moderate, genuine forces of Islam to rise up and say this: they do not represent us.

"Now, that's beginning to happen. God can bring good out of evil."

Cardinal Dolan was expanding on comments he had made in New York media last month, when he had made a similar analogy.

The Ulster Unionist Party's Tom Elliott told the Belfast Newsletter he questioned just how far the Catholic Church really had gone in denouncing IRA violence.

Asked whether he believed Cardinal Dolan's reference to the Catholic Church's anti-IRA stance rings true, he said: "On some occasions it does.

"However, I never knew the Catholic Church to not bury a [Provisional IRA] person and some of them allowed, obviously, those terrorist or paramilitary funerals at their church.

"So while they did go some way, they had options to go much further."

Sources

• Catholic Herald
• Belfast Newsletter
• The Journal
• Image: BBC