Being-With the Church: A Heideggerian Analysis of Youths’ Lived Experiences of Synodality in the Diocese of Ilagan

Abstract

This philosophical study interprets the lived experiences of youth coordinators and leaders (N=19) within the Diocese of Ilagan through Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology, focusing on synodality as a mode of Being-with the Church. Interview narratives and written reflections were read as factical disclosures of belonging, participation, listening, accompaniment, and ecclesial identity. Guided by Heidegger’s concepts of Mitsein, care, solicitude, authenticity, thrownness, and temporality, the analysis found that young people experience the Church most concretely as a relational world enacted through service, recognition, dialogue, and shared mission. Their accounts also disclosed tensions between genuine co-responsibility and forms of exclusion, conformity, and merely consultative participation. Recurring descriptions of the Church as “tayo,” home, and a hospital for the wounded reveal a desire for an ecclesial community capable of receiving vulnerability while enabling responsible agency. The study argues that synodality is not only an ecclesial procedure but an existential mode of being-together, and that authentic youth accompaniment requires forms of care that open possibilities rather than substitute for young people’s own discernment and action.