Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about Pope Benedict XVI's U.S. visit with Peter Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America, and religion columnist for The New York Times:

Q: How meaningful was the papal visit for the future of the U.S. Catholic Church?

A: I think this is an important visit because it's put a human face on the papacy under this pope and a human face on the former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. I think it's no surprise that Catholics get excited and warmly welcome any pope who comes to the United States, because the papacy represents their idea of the church as a worldwide reality united somehow in belief and in practice, and the pope is central to that idea. But there are many dimensions of that church -- doctrinal, disciplinary, liturgical, and personal -- and I think the pope has emphasized the pastoral dimension of that and put that particular face on the papacy, and I think that does not solve all the challenges that the American Catholic church faces, but I think it's a very significant development.

Q: There are, indeed, many challenges facing the church. Is a pastoral hand needed?

A: I think the pastoral hand is very important because it stresses the person-to-person relationship, it stresses the need for the discretion, if you will, of the pastor to deal with a particular situation, and therefore a kind of flexibility, which is always in some tension with what you might call the doctrinal or the rule-dimension of the Catholic Church, so it's interesting that that's what's been emphasized by Benedict XVI.

Q: A lot of people expected, especially perhaps because of his previous role, that he would come and be very doctrinal.

A: That's right. People have that image of him, if they had any image of him. We actually know from surveys that about 80 percent of the country said they only had the vaguest idea of the pope, although they were favorably disposed. So in some ways he was introducing himself, and he was writing on a blank slate.

Q: It struck me that he was willing to address some of the problems and perhaps confront them in a more open way than expected. Is that significant?

A: I think that his talks will be pored over by leaders of the church, but I don't think they will have a wide impact on ordinary believers. In those talks, however, he did stress themes like unity, reconciliation, understanding one for another, so they weren't talks that were drawing sharp lines -- who's in or who's out. Now that may not be sufficient to deal with the institutional issues that face the Catholic Church in the United States, such as, an obvious one, the growing shortage of priests, but this is not an institutional pope. This is a pope who stresses ideas, theology, worship, prayer. He seems to believe that if you get those things right, the rest will fall in line. Other people may take a different approach. They say we need some institutional and organizational changes.

Q: I noticed that in his speeches, rather than spending a lot of time talking about specific issues, including in the UN speech, he made broad philosophical, foundational points. I'm wondering about the impact of that. Isn't there the possibility that those remarks could be taken in many different directions?

A: I think the word "foundational" is quite important for this pope. I think he really wants to put foundations in place, and he returns to that all the time, so that unlike some of the speeches of popes previously to the UN, Paul VI and John Paul II, you didn't have any strong images. You didn't have much of an emotional appeal. It was philosophical, even more philosophical than theological. Even Jesus Christ wasn't mentioned until the last or the second to the last sentence. But I think it is that conviction he has that, for the church when he becomes more theological and for society when he maybe becomes more philosophical, it's important to have the right foundations in place, the right kind of grounding in ideas and beliefs.

Q: Does he have confidence everyone will end up in the same place? Part of the issue with the U.S. church is that people take those foundations but then move in different directions.

A: I think he does have a confidence, and I should say that his idea of foundations, finally, is not simply an abstract set of ideas. It's an encounter with God, and for him it is an encounter with the human face of God, Jesus. He keeps returning to that theme. I think he does recognize that you could go in different directions with that, and that's why, for Catholics, he thinks it's important to have a community which is ordered in some way. But I think he's willing to -- he does have the confidence that if you have the right foundations you will, in some way -- your differences at least will not be destructive ones.

Q: He spoke a lot about the importance of Catholics taking their faith and those values and not just keeping them inside, but letting them have an impact on the society at large. How important a theme was that for him?

A: I think that's very important, but it's not set out in a programmatic or policy specific way. I think this is a leader who believes that if you get the internal orientation right, if you are convinced about the love of God for you, the necessity of modeling oneself on Jesus, that these other things, of carrying this out into the world and caring for the vulnerable and so on, will spring naturally from that.

Q: He spent time on several occasions here, albeit briefly, with leaders other faiths. How significant were those meetings? How significant may they been for future dialogue?

A: I think those were important meetings because they played off against something that he had been identified with, namely the need to be clear about one's own beliefs. He had emphasized that if you come to dialogue, if it's going to be real dialogue, you've got to bring something to it, which are your specific beliefs. But that has given him sometimes the image of a person who is not sympathetic to other faith traditions and other believers. So I think this was the other side of the coin. This was an effort to show his views whole, namely be clear about your own beliefs but be willing to enter into discussion with those who have others and to respect them.

Q: These symbolic gestures, then, even the photo opportunities, have important substance behind them?

A: Right, and I think that they -- for him it's also a reminder that this dialogue between faiths is ultimately not just a meeting of different abstract principles or beliefs, but it's really a relationship of people.

Q: Is this different from the days of John Paul II?

A: It's a little difficult when we talk about interfaith relations to describe the very subtle differences between John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Certainly John Paul II took major initiatives in reaching out to other faith groups, and his whole millennium celebration of apologies for things that the church had done were very dramatic, and I think that Benedict is more cautious than that in those regards, but -- so there's a different style, but probably the substance isn't that different between them when it comes to interfaith relationships.

Q: At the youth rally in New York there was an energy there that we don't always see surrounding this pope. I'm wondering how significant you think that may be in perhaps inspiring young people to pursue religious vocations or a religious calling?

A: I think these kind of mass encounters, where people get a sense that they're not alone in their beliefs, are important to young people. I was struck how the youth rally seemed to give the pope himself a kind of buoyancy that I hadn't noticed in the rest of the trip. There were many moments when he seemed to be in a very happy state and smiling and so on throughout the trip. But there was an energy and buoyancy that it seemed to give him at the youth rally that was almost surprising.

Q: There was a lot of talk about the meeting with sex abuse victims and the many times he referred to the issue. How much may this contribute to healing?

A: I think that the emphasis that Benedict put on the sex abuse crisis is very interesting and also a bit surprising. I would've suspected he might be more cautious and worried that that kind of action could overshadow all the other messages he wanted to deliver in this trip, so he was taking an interesting risk in doing that. I don't think that any one thing like this is going to bring complete closure to this issue, and it's a mistake to think that. And, also, I think that this may have been as important a lens on Benedict and on his pastoral style and emphasis as it was a lens on the problems of the church in the United States, because frankly I think that there are problems that the church here would face even if none of those terrible crimes had ever been committed.

Q: One of the issues has been a longstanding tension between the Vatican and some Catholic institutions around the boundaries of academic freedom. There was some speculation that there might be some wrist-slapping while Benedict was meeting with Catholic educators. What's your take on his meeting with them?

A: I think that was an extraordinarily subtle speech, and maybe too subtle. He said some things about the relationship of truth and freedom and responsibility which were in line with other things he said in the past. But when he came to deal with the question of academic freedom for Catholic institutions of higher education, he put out on the line the necessity of academic freedom, but also the necessity of upholding church teaching, and I'm not sure that there was really any great progress in trying to work out that complicated relationship.

Q: What are some of the big challenges facing the church that will remain well after Benedict has gone, and have you seen anything in this visit that might help address them?

A: Well, the two big institutional questions in a sense are the change in leadership of the church, from a leadership primarily made up of priests and also women religious and some brothers to a leadership which is increasingly, in all Catholic institutions, made up of lay men and women, and I don't -- I'm not sure that the pope really addressed that. There are tensions there about how to recognize the new roles of lay men and women in the leadership of the Catholic Church here. The second issue is the generational change, and that's kind of a culture issue. There's an older generation that still had some formation in a very thick Catholic subculture, often with an ethnic basis of one sort or another, and now you have generations coming into leadership which have grown up in a very different world, and again, how does the church deal with that? That second question I think [Benedict] would think you deal with by his emphasis on the centrality of Jesus, on church teaching, thinking with the church, and on prayer and worship. Whether that's enough is yet to be seen.

Q: A recent Pew survey found that Catholics have suffered more net losses than any other major religion. That's been a big issue, hasn't it?

A: The Pew survey showed that about one-third of the people who said as adults that they had been raised as Catholics were no longer as adults identifying themselves as Catholic, and that's provoked a very, very intense debate on all sides within the church -- how to explain that, with of course liberals saying the reason is the church hasn't been liberal enough and conservatives saying the reason is the church hasn't been conservative enough. Other groups have actually lost higher percentages. There's a lot of switching of faiths that goes on in the United States, and the Catholic Church of course was fortunate at the same time to be gaining the adherence of so many immigrants and significant numbers of converts as well. But there are questions there that still need much further explanation.

Q: This was an opportunity for the U.S. to learn more about this pope, but it was also a chance for Benedict to learn more about the U.S. and the US church, wasn't it?

A: It's interesting to try and reflect on what Benedict will take back from this visit, you know. He knows how organized and in a sense artificial many of his encounters were. He wasn't out doing a random survey or sociological or even friendly conversations. But I think he probably will go away impressed not only with the diversity but with the spiritual diversity, with the enthusiasm of the young people, with the beauty and the formality, in many ways, of the Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, where he himself, in line with what he's often said, stressed beauty as another important channel to God.

Q: In this era of TV and the Internet, with video and images, in a visit like this the outward, visual aspects take on a real importance, don't they?

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A: I think that's true, and this is where John Paul II was a master of the visible gesture. I think that Benedict is, if anything, just learning to do that, and Cardinal Levada at a luncheon in New York the other day (Cardinal Levada is the former archbishop of San Francisco who has succeeded Benedict in his position as heading the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith) -- he suggested that actually Benedict has come maybe to enjoy being pope more than was anticipated, because he is an academic and a more introverted man, and that he's learning how to be pope and how to greet people and how to engage in these kind of visible gestures and symbols.

Q: What are some images that will stay with you?

A: Well, I think the image of his silent prayer at Ground Zero will stick with us, because it was a silent prayer, because he was saying in many ways that this kind of evil is beyond words and that we can trivialize it by trying to capture it in words so easily. I think his embrace and his greeting of all the disabled children at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers will remain with us. I think those are two of the -- and I think that the joy on his face in dealing with the young people at the rally at St. Joseph's also.

Q: Why do you think he didn't even mention Iraq in the UN speech?

A: I think Benedict was very, very careful not to get into the role of politics in the United States or policy recommendations in general. His United Nations talk had only the most general advice to the world, and I think that he knows Iraq is now an issue in the presidential election and anything he said would have been snapped up by one side or the other. I also think that the Vatican knows that, much as they feel that the Iraq invasion was a mistake in the first place, it's not going to be an easy situation to exit from.