September 25, 2025
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Thank you all for your help and patience as we continue making improvements to our VIRTUS platform, continuing education projects, and parish visits. I am so honored to work with all of you and to be in this mission together in the name of Jesus for our children, youth, and vulnerable adults.
Background Check Authorization Form Automations
The Background Authorization Check is LIVE for first time users!
When a first-time registrant creates an account, they are now required to provide their date of birth, gender, race, and whether they have resided in the State of Michigan for the last seven years.
They also are prompted to sign and authorize a Background Check to be conducted by your parish/school. Upon completion of their registration, you will be able to pull all their information from VIRTUS to conduct an ICHAT (please see the links below for pictorial examples). The best part? This authorization form is a one-and-done agreement due to the fact our VIRTUS users will be agreeing to an annual (or every two years for our volunteers) background check by signing this form.
**please note we are still working through the technical issues for current users and that more information will come out next week.
NEW VIRTUS Updates
Here are some links to our TEAMS Channel of some of the current updates and procedures regarding VIRTUS.
NEW Educate The Educator – A Webinar On How To Equip Our Teachers, DREs, & Catechists On How To Successful Teach Empowering God’s Children
Crispin Montelione, the Content Creator for VIRTUS, has 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 three more in the upcoming months!
Our first session will be Tuesday, October 28 from 10am-12pm. Register HERE. If you are not a DRE or an educator, please feel free to pass this on.
Mass Inactivation
On September 30, VIRTUS will deactivate the accounts of anyone who hasn’t logged in since August 2020. We are conducting this mass deactivation because the recertification requirement is on a three-year basis and anyone who hasn’t logged in to their VIRTUS account in five years is well out of compliance. Please note that this mass inactivation will rid the database system of about 60,000 users who are currently not active. Once this process is completed. It will give Safe Environments the ability to continue with automation processes, such as, having current users get mass email sent out to fill out the Authorization Background Check Form and automatically assigning recertification modules.
**Please feel free to write about this in your parish bulletin to ensure that all your volunteers who would like to be active in their ministry log into their account to not inactive them.
REMINDER All Local VIRTUS Admins: Mark Your Calendars For October 15 At 9:00 a.m.
Pat Neal, Director of the VIRTUS Program, is going to have an in-person and webinar presentation about all the changes happening in VIRTUS and how to best use them in your parish and school as a Local Administrator.
- Webinar | October 15 at 9:00 a.m.: This webinar is geared towards those in our parishes and schools who work with VIRTUS on a regular basis, and anyone is welcome to join! I will send a reminder email in mid-September and another in early October. If you are interested in joining, please register here. This session will be recorded and available in the “Files” section of our Teams channel. For those you interested in joining our Teams submit your request here.
- In-person | October 15 at 1:00 p.m.: Pat and I will join the Business Managers Quarterly Meeting to have an in-person presentation about the automation changes and some of the key features that are beneficial to our schools and parishes. After the presentation there will be time for a Q & A.
Finally, I want to share several resources with you. As part of our duty in Safe Environments, accessibility to key documentation is a priority. The list will grow longer as more newsletters go out. For now, I leave you with these:
