April 8, 2026
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
2026 USCCB Audit
The 2026 USCCB Audit Tool is LIVE. Please read through the information below to make sure your parish and/or school are set up for success:
- Please complete the audit form and return it no later than June 1, 2026 at 5pm. All parishes and schools who submit after June 1, 2026, will be considered non-compliant.
- If your parish and school are separate entities in Virtus, please submit one form for each entity.
- The Safe Environment Office of the Archdiocese of Detroit will report the numbers for priests, deacons, and seminarians.
- For the 2026 audit, fingerprinting is required only for educators and employees of a school entity.
- Please review our policies for training and screening for the Office of Safe Environments HERE
We will only accept numbers from your C/D compliance Chart in VIRTUS this year. Your VIRTUS database must reflect the current spreadsheet you are holding for compliance. Please note: It is important that you upload the most recent BGC date you ran for an individual into VIRTUS.
Access the Audit Form HERE
If you need to schedule a time to meet with Maegan Pierson, Safe Environments Manager, about any of your compliance needs, please do so HERE
Thank you all for your endless patience and care towards upholding the safety of children and vulnerable adults. Each one of you has done incredible work, and we look forward to continuing to make a difference in our parishes and schools.
Child Abuse Prevention Month
April is Child Abuse Prevention Month. As part of our due diligence, this month is an opportunity to reflect and promote awareness in our communities to make a difference.
In 2025 alone, The Office of Safe Environments trained; 6,906 new individuals in Protecting God’s Children and recertified over 15,000. In addition, thanks to our teachers, catechists, and directors of religious education, we trained 27,845 children in Empowering God’s Children.
By creating cultural awareness and promoting this vital work, we can teach children and adults what it means to have healthy relationships with one another and foster a community that protects and looks out for one another. We would like to take this opportunity to thank and recognize everyone who play a role in Protecting all of God’s Children.
For every week in the month of April, we will be spotlighting an article that is designated to create awareness around Child Abuse Prevention. This week we are featuring an article titled, "Artificial Intelligence - Deepfakes and Child Abusers" by Robert Hugh Farley, MS.
Please feel free to post this article on your Safe Environments webpage as additional resources.
In addition, you will find some links with lots of great information below. We kindly ask that you take a moment to read through the materials and to post the flyers in visible places at your parish or school. Please consider posting in the parish bulletin itself, a physical bulletin board, or anywhere else that you regularly post announcements in your parish or school. The more we do on our end to raise awareness of this critical mission, the better our chances of building Safe Environments in our respective communities.
Bulletin Communication
There have been some questions about how to best inform our volunteers about the AOD requirements for Protecting God’s Children. I impart to you the gift of an updated bulletin communication. If some of you have bulletin communications, you have found to be helpful in your parish or school, please email them to pierson.maegan@aod.org
Safe Environments Local Administrator Excel Sheet
One of the many projects The Office of Safe Environments is working on to help better serve you is trying to clean up the VIRTUS database. I was able to pull an Excel sheet with all the Local Administrators (see in the link HERE) Please edit this document to reflect the Local Admin at your parish or school. If your Local Admin information is incorrect and you make any changes, please highlight those changes in yellow. If the current Local Admin listed in the document is correct, please highlight the information in green. Once this document is fully updated, I will send it out with everyone’s emails and phone numbers, so we can better connect with one another.
Merging Locations in VIRTUS
If you would like your parish and school to be one entity in VIRTUS or there are a number of parishes that submit as one entity for the USCCB Audit, please email Maegan at pierson.maegan@aod.org and we are more than happy to help you make this happen 😊
