January 28, 2026
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
USCCB Audit Preview and Important Deadlines
The Safe Environment’s Office is preparing for the 2026 USCCB Audit. This year, in addition to our regular annual submission, the auditing company, Stonebridge, will visit the Archdiocese of Detroit in the later summer/ early fall (2026) for an in-person audit to ensure that we are compliant with the USCCB Dallas Charter. Our office will send out the instructions for the process next month, but we thought it would be helpful to give you some dates to pencil into your calendar to help you prepare for the audit.
Submissions for the 2026 USCCB Audit are due on June 1, 2026, at 5pm. There will be no extensions this year.
Submissions for attendance of children trained in Empowering God’s Children are due May 15, 2026, at 5pm.
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.
We will send you a survey for you to fill out as part of your submission this year. This survey will be available starting April 1, 2026, at 9am.
There will be three training sessions on how to complete the survey, run a C/D compliance chart, and enter the numbers for Empowering God’s Children. The dates and times for the training are as follows:
- Tuesday, February 17 from 1pm to 2pm (sign-up HERE )
- Thursday, March 26 from 10am to 11am (sign-up HERE )
All three trainings will be recorded and available to watch on both the Teams channel and linked in the resource section of this newsletter as well.
** RECORDING FROM 1/21 HERE
If you need to schedule a time to meet with Maegan Pierson, Safe Environments Manager, about how to update your VIRTUS database system. Please do so HERE
NEW: Safe Environments Local Administrator List
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.
Yearly Mass Deactivation Scheduled for the End of January
As part of our yearly maintenance, The Office of Safe Environments will be performing a mass deactivation on January 30th at 11am (EST). Anyone who has not logged into their VIRTUS account in the last four years will be inactivated. We are conducting this mass deactivation because the recertification requirement is every three years, and anyone who hasn’t logged into their VIRTUS account in four+ years is out of compliance. Please note that this mass deactivation will eliminate about 8,000 users from the database.
**We encourage parishes to include information about the upcoming mass deactivation in their parish bulletins to ensure that all volunteers who would like to remain active, are able to do so (by logging into their account).
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 😊
Educate The Educator – A Webinar On How To Equip Our Teachers, Dre, & Catechists On How To Successful Teach Empowering God’s Children
Crispin Montelione, the Content Creator of VIRTUS, has so generously offered to facilitate four webinars on how to better equip our educators, DRE’s, and catechists on Empowering God’s Children. She will go over the lesson plans, how to deliver the content to both the children and the parents, what makes this educational program successful in your parish or school, and what to do when you receive push back.
Our fourth session will be Thursday March 19th from 10am-12pm. Register HERE . If you are not a DRE or educator, please feel free to pass this on.
Recertification Module for 2026–2029
Our new recertification module is entitled, “Teaching Boundaries and Safety Online Module 2.0”. Please use THISdocument as a reference for the current trainings available and when users need to complete their next training. Please also note that 15 days prior to the expiration of an individual’s initial Protecting God’s Children Certification, VIRTUS will automatically assign the recertification module.
