March 23, 2026
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
REMINDER: 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:
- 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: 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.
Below you will find some links with lots of great information. 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
NEW: VIRTUS Updates
Background Check Authorization Form: When an individual is signing their background check authorization form, once they have signed it and submitted it, it automatically goes to the next page. This differs from before when they needed to consent to the form twice.
Local Administrator Rights and Functions: Please read here for further information. If you would like to schedule a time to reorganize the functions of your Local Administrators, please do so here
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 😊
