January 7, 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. In addition to our annual submission, Stonebridge (the company that conducts the audit on behalf of he USCCB) will conduct an in-person visit in the later summer or early fall of 2026 to ensure that we are compliant with the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
Our office will send out instructions for the audit process next month, but we wanted to give you some dates to pencil into your calendars:
- Submissions for the 2026 USCCB Audit will be due on June 1, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. There will be no extensions this year.
- Submissions for attendance of children trained in Empowering God’s Children will be due May 15, 2026, at 5:00 p.m.
- We will only accept numbers from your C/D compliance Chart in VIRTUS this year. We will not request numbers from you in the survey. Your VIRTUS database must reflect the current spreadsheet you are holding for compliance.
- We will send you a seven-question survey as part of your submission this year. This survey will be available starting April 1, 2026, at 9:00 a.m.
There will be three training sessions on the survey, running a C/D compliance chart, and entering the numbers for Empowering God’s Children. The dates and time for the training are as follows:
- Wednesday, January 21 from 4:00–5:00 p.m. (sign-up HERE )
- Tuesday, February 17 from 1:00–2:00 p.m. (sign-up HERE )
- Thursday, March 26 from 10:00–11:00 a.m. (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.
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: 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.
If you can’t make it to this session, we will have one more in February!
Our third session will be Tuesday, January 13 from 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Register HERE . If you are not a DRE or an 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.
