Yes, let's stick to barrier contraception. Chemical contraception can be abortifacient and all have harmful side effects on the mother, so they are also sinful for these reasons. Spilling the semen is another form of barrier contraception, employed by Onan, but you seem to either not realize that there is no difference between using a condom and the sin of Onan, or you are not persuaded by the biblical example of Onan punished for it. So let us discuss the natural law aspect.
It is true that people make love while animals merely mate. We are indeed asked to love everyone and to marry not merely to make children but for mutual sanctification (1 Cor. 7:14). Making sexual love is a good activity in this, uniquely human context. The Church never taught that lovemaking needs to be restricted to only cases when pregnancy is the goal and a real possibility. Indeed, it is for that reason that God gave us the "window" in time, when the woman is not ovulating but nevertheless enjoys sex, and men enjoy sex, well, pretty much always. During that window time, a married couple may enjoy sex whether or not they desire children to come of it, and since that is the window, they both know that the probability of pregnancy is very low.
Further, the window can be examined scientifically: the wife may take her temperature and examine herself, -- simple techniques exist that make natural family planning as reliable as any contraception to avoid a pregnancy, and it also can be used to achieve a pregnancy. So make use of the window that God gave you. It swings both ways.
The next question is, is it moral to avoid sex during a fertile period? The answer would depend on the motivation. When a pregnancy carries serious health risks, or when a serious economic hardship should result from the expense of raising another child, it is moral to abstain from sex during the fertile days. Otherwise, it is not moral: it is then deliberate childlessness, a sin.
So the question becomes, can we extend the "window" provided we have a moral right to avoid pregnancy?-- and the answer is, absolutely we can morally do so. Wives, make love to your husbands; men, make love to your wives: touch them, smile to them, play with them, bring them gifts: behave like a couple in love behaves in courtship prior to marriage. Re-learn romantic love. The inability to consummate lovemaking is an aphrodisiac that, in a few days, when the window is back in, will reward you.
Further, if your lovemaking during a fertile period leads you to intercourse that just could not be resisted, -- well, so God is leading you to make another baby. Don't fight God.
Can then a condom be a mechanical device that would allow lovemaking to become an unproductive intercourse, replacing the natural time window with a spatial, literal wall? It can allow the mechanics of the intercourse, but it would no longer be lovemaking. How so? The instinctive sexual appetite that God put in us is a single desire. It is not sometimes unitive and sometimes procreative: it is a single sexual instinct, both unitive and procreative at the same time. A condom, by disabling the procreative part, disables the unitive part also; it does, in fact, primarily disunites: it is after all, a barrier. The sex -- a sequence of rubbing motions and then a release -- will occur; the lovemaking will cease. Sexual love with the procreative possibility removed is two people lying "I love you" with their bodies. "I love you, but I deny you motherhood"; "I love you, but I reject your semen". The physiology is fooled, the physiological drive is down for a day, but the mutual sanctification, one prescribed to us by St. Paul, is blocked because there is a lie at its foundation. You said your wanted to become one body. Are you?
You expressed it all perfectly. Thank you so much!
We are the Body of Christ, member for member.
Jesus Christ came to give us LIFE and LOVE.
He did not separate these two gifts. When He gave for his Body the Church, He gave ALL.
He held back nothing.
...........................
We are a covenanted People. From Genesis to Revelation God reveals to us His everlasting love and keeps His covenant with us to save us from our sins and to offer us a personal role in his body, the Church (1Cor. 12;27).
Time and again God’s covenant with believers is likened to the marriage covenant between a man and his wife, alluded to or typified in passages in Isaiah, Hosea, and the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in Revelation. Jesus is referred to as the Bridegroom in the clear teaching on covenantal married love in Ephesians 5:22-23. Jesus chose to work his first miracle at a wedding feast in Cana. (John 2)
In giving Himself, Jesus held back nothing. He gave us all. He gave and suffered in human form (Phil.2:6-11) but He is victorious for us as God. He spoke to us of this giving and this covenant which is clearly defined in Luke 22: 19-20.
We are asked many times to live our Christian lives with such fullness that Christ lives and acts through us (1John4:15, 18, 2Cor.13:3-5, John 15:4). “I live now, no not I, but Christ lives in me!” This means, as Our Lord showed us by his life which He wished us to imitate...that we hold back nothing, but give all.
As married people, we are visible signs to the world of God’s covenant with His people. This covenant of God with us gives totally of two things
LIFE and LOVE.
If married people are to share Christ with the world, within the covenant of marriage, they must, like Our Savior, give to each other both life and love. In this way, Christ lives in us (Gal2:20) and at our own human and earthly level we can echo the glorious words of Jesus at the Last Supper on the wonderful evening: “This is my body, which will be given up for you....(of the New and Eternal Covenant”) (Luke 22:19)
In this way, we live out in our finite, human level of the marriage covenant that which the Bridegroom, in his Divinity, gave to his Church.
In marriage, if contraception takes place, the covenant is either barred or broken at its very core...that part of us which is capable of transmitting life. This is the very gift which is such a positive sign of how we are created in his image and likeness...that powerful gift of sharing in God’s plan of creation of new life.
We can no more wish to cut or block this life-giving power that God has designed to share with us, than we could believe that Jesus would refuse to give us life through his saving blood, or refuse us the unconditional love of which that Precious Blood is a sign and seal.
Without contraception, husband and wife give to each other unconditionally, just as Christ gave to his bride the Church. The fertility which they share is the life-giving dimension of their covenant and finds its expression in the love-giving dimension of that covenant.
Whether the couple chooses to use the full creative power of their love, which may, if God so wills it, bring into the world new life destined for heaven, or whether they choose to forego married physical love for a brief number of days because a pregnancy may necessarily or prudently be postponed for a while...(and therefore they draw apart for a while (1Cor.7:5}..... they are, IN EITHER CASE, living their covenant as God does with his people.
In either situation they are sharing the Master’s way:
“THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU”
When contraception is practiced, the fertility (the life-giving dimension) of one of the partners is denied or obstructed.
It also upsets the mutual giving which is necessary to every covenant.
Covenant is the principle of “mutual gift-and-response” that enlivens the Christian conscience down the corridors of time.
Through God our Father we have received Life. This life has been made eternal for us through Jesus, the Son, who gave totally of Himself because He loved us.
He sent His Spirit, the Spirit of Love, to teach and guide us in all things.
This is God’s covenant with us: Life and Love.
In marriage, we are covenanted in Christ Jesus as signs to the world of His unconditional life-giving and love-giving. We fulfill this covenant in a holy manner when we leave our marriages open-—unobstructed and in unbroken unity-—to both life and love.
“Spilling the semen is another form of barrier contraception, employed by Onan, but you seem to either not realize that there is no difference between using a condom and the sin of Onan...”
There is a difference.
The story of Onan:
“8 Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.” 9 But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So whenever he went in to his brother’s wife he would waste the semen on the ground, so as not to give offspring to his brother. 10 And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.”
Notice Onan was going to his brother’s wife & having sex with her for the express purpose of giving her a child. Onan was willing to go have the sex, but not to have the kid - and the only justification for having sex with his brother’s wife WAS to have children.
This was a time when childbearing was more important than it is now, unless the Catholic Church still teaches that if your brother dies without offspring, you should go sleep with his widow and give her kids...
“Further, if your lovemaking during a fertile period leads you to intercourse that just could not be resisted, — well, so God is leading you to make another baby. Don’t fight God.”
By the same reasoning, do not lock your doors. If God sends the thief, who are you to object?
The question rests on if a man can use his brain to modify the results of what he does. If God sends me a headache, can I use aspirin to ‘thwart’ his will? I just had a mole removed, and the biopsy is cancer...so I’m going back in a couple of weeks to have a bigger hole made, hopefully removing all the cancer God has sent my way. I also use seatbelts when I drive, rather than refuse to drive at all. If God sends a drunk driver into the side of my car, I’d like to modify the likely outcome.
“It can allow the mechanics of the intercourse, but it would no longer be lovemaking. How so?...Sexual love with the procreative possibility removed is two people lying “I love you” with their bodies.”
Indeed...how so? My wife will not get pregnant if if I make love to her tonight, so it is no longer love-making, but something else? It will be a lie, just animalistic rubbing of bodies? Sorry, we think otherwise - and so do the overwhelming majority of men and women. We are humans, not dogs. Sex isn’t just procreation. Intercourse is entirely possible without the female being in heat, or even close to it.
It is written, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Not, “they create a baby, one flesh”. Oneness without always creating a new one. It is not the way of dogs, but it is the way of man.