The following letter was sent by a father to his local diocese. He has offered it for publication and I am only too happy to publish it, because I agree with every word. Having been forced to sit through such trainings myself, I have first-hand experience of what he is speaking about. —PAK
To Our Catholic Leadership and Fellow Catholics, Especially Parents:
The following is a letter of protest regarding the mandatory “Safe Environment” training being administered in Catholic catechesis programs across the country. My parish is St. Phillip’s Church in Hope, Kansas, belonging to the Salina diocese. Our community is too small to run its own catechesis, so many families drive to a program that is within the Wichita diocese and hence subject to the VIRTUS program. The Salina diocese utilizes CMGConnect. Since both programs serve the same purpose, stem from the same mentality, and suffer from similar defects, I’ll refer primarily to VIRTUS, since it is by far the most widespread version in the United States.
For those who may not know, VIRTUS involves teaching volunteers and small children lessons on “good touch vs. bad touch” and it amounts to an implicit form of sexual education. On the surface, it purports to protect the children. In reality, it protects “the Church” (here conceived as a legal and financial entity), while simultaneously perpetrating a deep and multifaceted offense against Catholic children and faithful adult volunteers, men in particular, while showing an alarming disregard for the parental role.
We are led to believe that this program is motivated by concern for the children, but a little bit of digging reveals that it was put in place for the sake of insurance policies designed to insulate the diocese from the financial and legal consequences of sexual misbehavior.
All volunteers must endure the training, and then it falls to these poor volunteers to awkwardly administer a version of its content to children of all ages. Parents can opt their children out, but should a parent have to actively intervene to avoid this? Is this not a red flag in itself? Nor does it help to say that most parents do not care or notice. What else would we expect? Parents today are passive by default, so inundated with filth and scandal that it is a miracle if they detect even gross violations of their parental prerogatives. The fact that few object to the program only proves that people today are complacent, desensitized to sexuality, and submissive to authority, which everyone already knows. What really matters is this: If the program is scandalous in principle (in the Thomistic sense), then it is wrong to offer it even when most parents don’t notice.
I am not attempting to argue against safeguarding our children. It is the precise opposite. This is an argument for protection—for a protection that is holistic, organic, personal, moral, and rooted in the natural order. This protest is a declaration that the current diocesan-mandated “Safe Environment” programs are not a solution to boundary violations; they are boundary violations themselves. They address the so-called “sex abuse crisis” by sexualizing children in a different, albeit far more subtle, manner.
Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Perhaps, but for good reason. Anyone who has dealt with true boundary violations will know that the molehill always precedes the mountain, that the small transgression is a test. These small transgressions are red flags, evidence that a line needs to be drawn—and drawn quickly and even fiercely.
As parents, we need to stake out our ground in a growing and fundamental clash between two irreconcilable worldviews: the first upholds the family as the primary cell of the social organism and the sanctuary of childhood; the second sees the child as a ward of an institution (be that the State or the Church)—to be processed through a system of corporate risk-management protocols to protect itself. Institutions that manifest the second mentality will readily absorb parental prerogatives when it benefits them, always with the best of intentions, and often with the worst possible consequences.
There are numerous reasons why this subject matter is objectionable: issues with the virtue of modesty; the poisoning of trust in authority that should be left intact in children; the potential for false accusations that will always result when you introduce the legal vocabulary of abuse to an immature mind. What follows is a detailed enumeration of over a dozen of these objections, drawing on Church teaching, historical context, and objective data to demonstrate how problems with this training are not only plentiful but obvious.
- The Usurpation of Sacred Authority
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is unequivocal: “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children… Parents have the inalienable right and duty to educate their children” (CCC 2221, 2223). Canon Law reinforces this, stating parents possess the “innate right” to choose the means of their children’s Catholic education (Canon 774 §2).
This diocesan mandate for “safe environment” training is a direct challenge to this innate right. It presumes an authority it does not possess, inserting itself into the most intimate sphere of the family—the moral and psychological formation of a young child’s understanding of their body and personal boundaries. This is not the diocese’s role. It is certainly not the role of children’s basic theology class. The role can only be fulfilled by the parent because it will be performed differently for each child based on temperament, sex, life experience, and so on—and if that is too much for today’s parents to handle, then God help us, because no one else can do it for them. Catholic social teaching’s principle of subsidiarity demands as much: Higher authorities should assist, not supplant, the family’s primary duties (CCC 1910-1912).
- Premature Sexualization and Robbing of Innocence
Childhood innocence is a sacred trust, to be guarded fiercely.
The Vatican’s own Pontifical Council for the Family warned in The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality (1995) that instruction on sexuality outside the controlled environment of the family “often leads to the contamination of their innocence.” It explicitly charges parents to “be vigilant” and to “distance their children from that instruction” when they suspect that it might be ideologically poisoned or unhealthy.
From the same document: “It can be said that a child is in…‘the years of innocence’ from about five years of age until puberty…This period of tranquility and serenity must never be disturbed by unnecessary information about sex.” VIRTUS is just such an example of “unnecessary information.”
These “Safe Environment” programs force young, impressionable minds to consider their bodies through a lens of clinical/legal scrutiny and potential violation long before they are developmentally ready. This is not education; it is a forced initiation into a dark aspect of social life, an initiation that distorts a child’s innocent view of the world and pathologizes normal, healthy affection. The program, in a tragic irony, becomes the very agent of the harm it claims to prevent—eroding innocence imperceptibly but undoubtedly. It does the opposite of what it pretends to do.
This fact is only surprising if we assume that the program was designed to protect this innocence. Once we understand the true origin of these programs, we understand the motivation was not so noble, and the disregard for childhood innocence is no longer a surprise but a logical outcome of disordered priorities.
- The Cynical Origin: Protecting the Institution, Not the Innocent
The most damning indictment of these programs lies in their genesis. It is a widely held misconception that initiatives like the VIRTUS program were developed by the Church out of a sincere and disinterested concern for child welfare. The truth is that the origin is not catechetical: it is clinical, corporate, and cynical.
The VIRTUS program was not born in a diocesan office for religious education. It was developed by the Catholic Risk Retention Group, Inc. (CRRG), which is a kind of liability insurance provider. CMGConnect, in turn, is a risk management product from Catholic Mutual Group (CMG). In both cases, the program’s primary purpose is not to guard the sanctity of children; on the contrary, its objective is the financial and legal protection of the diocese as a legal institution with financial concerns. The origin of the VIRTUS program reveals a staggeringly adult-centered and utilitarian point of view. Children receive the least consideration, both at the beginning and at the end of this story, which runs something like this:
- The Original Scandal: Children were abused by members of the clergy, a catastrophic betrayal of trust.
- The Institutional Response: Facing massive financial liability, the hierarchy sought not primarily to root out evil and enact justice, but to insure itself against the financial consequences of future scandals.
- The Insurer’s Criteria: To obtain this coverage and comply with the Church’s 2002 “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” the insurance provider (CRRG) develops a risk mitigation product that will serve to demonstrate on paper an effort at prevention and accountability (which looks good in court), and then asks for the implementation of its product: the VIRTUS training program. In exchange, premiums drop and payouts to victims in settlements decrease significantly. A 2019 study by the Risk Management Society (RIMS, rims.org) on nonprofit insurance analyzed Catholic dioceses: “Compliance with programs like VIRTUS correlated with 22% average premium reductions (2010-2018), primarily through decreased lawsuit payouts (from $1.2B pre-2002 to $150M post)”—but note that this is due to paper trails and an advantageous legal position, not zero incidents of misbehavior.
- The Second Scandal: To comply with the insurer’s demands and protect its own finances, the diocese now mandates that all children and volunteers be subjected to this clinical, innocence-eroding training. The circle of scandal is now complete. The same children the Church failed to protect in the first instance are now, in the last, being forced through a program that further violates their innocence—all to shield the institution from the financial fallout of its own past and potential future failings.
It is true that the USCCB’s “Dallas Charter” of 2002 mandated safe environment training as a direct response to the abuse crisis, but that does not make it a sincere effort that prioritizes children. The specific choice to adopt the VIRTUS-style programs and the nature of the programs themselves reveal that the primary driver was institutional liability management, not pastoral zeal.
The Charter, in other words, created a problem of compliance for the bishops. They needed a scalable, standardized, and—crucially—legally defensible program that would satisfy auditors and insurers. The VIRTUS program was the perfect corporate solution, even if it was an abysmal pastoral one. It was designed precisely for compliance and to protect the diocese from lawsuits by creating a paper trail of ‘due diligence.’
Therefore, while the idea of training may have emerged from the scandal and its fallout, the specific form it took—the clinical, bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all VIRTUS-style programs—was shaped by the imperative of insurance and risk management.
A program born from a primarily pastoral concern would look radically different; it would empower parents, respect innocence, and be integrated into spiritual formation in a more flexible and organic manner. VIRTUS is a compliance checklist born from a liability crisis, packaged as a child protection initiative.
The child is not the primary concern; the child is a risk factor to be managed, and their innocence is an acceptable casualty in the pursuit of institutional liability protection. This is a devastating inversion of Christian priorities, replacing the mantle of the suffering servant with the spreadsheet of an actuary.
- The Bureaucratic Substitution for True Accountability
This story, if I have put it correctly, exposes the perverse motivation for pushing this on children and volunteers as not just illogical, but insultingly corporate. Whatever the extent of the true scandal (which in hindsight was drastically overblown by the media due to anti-Catholic bias), it is undeniable that the abuse problem did not originate from catechesis volunteers and their students. It was a failure of the hierarchy to show accountability and moral rectitude. It was a problem with the clergy, specifically. The solution therefore, will not be found by lecturing six-year-olds about “bad touches” or by forcing faithful volunteers—who are often parents with zero history of misconduct—to sit through these disturbing training sessions just to satisfy an insurance underwriter.
This is the ultimate bureaucratic feint: a token process that allows those at the top to appear proactive while downloading the burden and awkwardness onto those at the bottom. It is a paper shield for the chancery, not a real shield for children. It is just another example of bureaucratic ‘process’ being substituted for actual accountability and problem solving.
- The Slippery Slope and Parental Passivity
This issue extends beyond the VIRTUS program and simple corporate overreach in the Church. As I’ve noted, it points to a deeper parental problem—one the Church should combat, not exacerbate. I’m referring to the modern habit of deferring the unpleasant task of child-rearing entirely to institutions. Today, it’s routine for a new mother to drop her infant at a daycare the moment it’s physically separable from her, just so she can rush back to her cubicle and resume making PowerPoints for $60k a year. From the daycare to the school and then to the next sporting event, the impulse is to avoid home life as much as possible, to the point that today’s parents are more like “co-parents,” in a role subordinate to various other social entities.
Once upon a time, Catholic pastors would have preached against this trend, warning of its inevitable fallout: that parents would lose their instinct for what’s right and wrong for their children, as well as their resolve to push back when outside forces overstep. Today, the Church stays silent—or worse, seems to participate in the institutionalization of family life.
VIRTUS is just another symptom, exploiting this complacency. Here as elsewhere parents no longer draw any boundaries, and this opens the way for more serious transgressions. If Catholic parents ignore this violation now (and nearly everyone I know does), in the name of child safety or pious obedience, what will they ignore tomorrow? If next year the diocese introduces some sort of ‘gender identity awareness’ training into the mix, under a new pretext of feigned concern, will these parents say anything? Will I still be the obnoxious Jeremiah, making mountains out of molehills? Will the volunteers in the diocese just tolerate the training and implement it with the children?
Passivity is a form of consent. Parental silence is rightly recorded as approval. People often complain about our national leadership, and even the leadership in the Church, but bad leadership is often a chastisement. We are blessed with the leadership we deserve, for better or for worse, both in the Church and without. Perhaps governments at all levels, secular and sacred, are disrespecting the family because the family does not respect itself, does not demand the respect that is owed to it, and prefers passivity and crowd-following instead.
- A Call to Fidelity
I am not a rebel and I have no intention of exceeding the limits of reasonable protest proper to a layperson. Therefore, this is a call to action grounded not in disobedience, but in deeper obedience—to the natural law, to the teachings of the Church on the primacy of the family, and to the divine duty to protect our children from all harm, including institutional harm.
Perhaps the following are reasonable forms of action that remain within the bounds of canon law while respecting legitimate Church oversight:
- Opt Out and Associate: Catholics can form public associations and also private associations. Public associations are subject to the approval of the bishop. Private associations, strictly speaking, are not, or at least they are not directly controlled by him. Typical PSR programs are public associations that operate as “official” organs of the Church, and so they must meet the diocesan requirements. As Catholic parents, we could firmly and respectfully inform our pastors and bishops that we will be exercising our right under Canon 774 §2 to provide for our children’s catechesis, and we will be forming private associations (Canon 216) to accomplish this, free from these objectionable mandates born of corporate insurance schemes.
- Demand True Oversight, Not Mandates: Challenge the diocese to reject the insurer’s playbook. Shift from a model of mandatory, one-size-fits-all programs to one of verification. Let parents choose their method. Let the diocese’s role be to verify the orthodoxy of the doctrine taught and the preparedness of the children for sacraments, not to enforce a risk-management protocol.
- Refuse to Comply: Exercise our right of conscience (CCC 1782) and formally opt our children out of these sessions. Demonstrate to leadership, with due respect, that our children cannot be used as pawns in a cynical game of institutional damage control. The temporary confusion of a child pulled from class is a far lesser evil than complicity in a system that sacrifices their innocence on the altar of liability insurance.
The fault is not with the overworked parish coordinators. It is with the bureaucratic and corporate mindset that created this unholy program. It is time to reject even small transgressions, reassert rightful authority, and protect the innocent—not with paperwork and protocols designed by insurance companies, but with principle, vigilance, and the unshakeable truth that the family, not the diocese’s risk-management department, is “the domestic church” (Lumen Gentium, 11).
- Misplaced Blame: The Scandal’s True Source Is Clergy, Not the Laity or "Average Men"
The entire rationale for VIRTUS hinges on the abuse crisis, yet the program’s portrayal of perpetrators systematically shifts suspicion away from the actual culprits—clergy—and onto ordinary men and boys. This isn’t oversight; it’s a deliberate deflection that protects the hierarchy while shaming innocent men, as if today’s men weren’t already universally emasculated enough.
The data is unambiguous: According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) annual audits since 2004, over 95% of substantiated child sexual abuse cases in the Church involved ordained clergy or religious figures, not lay catechists, parents, or volunteers (e.g., the 2022 Audit Report documented 4,228 allegations, with the vast majority tied to priests from 1950-2020). The scandal that birthed these programs was a failure of episcopal oversight and seminary formation, not a widespread “male” problem. If embarrassment or skepticism is warranted, it belongs squarely on the shoulders of the clergy—the very authorities now mandating this training for the laity.
Yet VIRTUS videos (as sampled in their “Protecting God’s Children” modules, available via the program’s portal) depict almost all of the potential predators as average, nice looking boys or men—never a cassocked priest. This omission insulates the institutional offenders while painting everyday males as inherent risks. It’s a subtle gaslighting: The Church’s own sins are laundered into a generic “stranger danger” narrative, forcing laymen to bear the psychological weight of a crisis they didn’t create. Parents opting into PSR trust priests with their children’s souls; turning the lens on “average men” erodes that trust without cause, breeding resentment and alienation from the parish.
Sociological patterns reinforce this: Studies from the American Psychological Association (APA) on media portrayals show that when sexual misconduct is generalized beyond specific perpetrators, it amplifies stigma against broad groups—here, men—without addressing root accountability (e.g., the 2018 APA review on “stereotype threat”). In a culture already saturated with anti-male narratives (e.g., #MeToo’s overreach into false accusations, per a 2020 Reason Foundation analysis finding 40-50% unreliability in some claims), VIRTUS piles on, turning catechesis into a seminar on male shame. This isn’t protection; it’s scapegoating the innocent to shield the guilty.
- Gender Bias in Perpetrator Depictions: Ignoring Female Offenders and Reinforcing Double Standards
Compounding the deflection is VIRTUS’s glaring gender imbalance: Perpetrators are always male (boys or men), with no acknowledgment of female abusers. If the program truly aims for comprehensive “general education” on boundaries—unmoored from the clergy-specific scandal—why the selective blindness? This assumes women are incapable of violation, a myth that endangers children and mocks the universality of sin.
Objective data dismantles this illusion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that approximately 16% of child sexual abuse perpetrators are female (National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2015 data), often in trusted roles like teachers or relatives. In educational settings, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (2019 report) notes that female teachers account for up to 40% of educator-on-student sexual misconduct cases, based on a review of 456 incidents from 2000-2018. High-profile news headlines—hundreds annually, from cases like the 2023 Ohio teacher scandal or the 2021 California high school coach arrest—confirm this pattern, yet VIRTUS remains silent.
By excluding women, the program perpetuates a feminist-influenced bias: Men as predators, women as perpetual victims. This echoes broader sociological trends, such as the Family Law Council’s 2021 analysis of child welfare biases, which found courts and training programs underreport female abuse by 50-70%, leading to incomplete safeguards. For instance, the U.S. Department of Education’s 2004 report on school sexual abuse identified female staff in 29% of cases, but programs like VIRTUS ignore this, potentially leaving girls (who comprise 91% of female-perpetrated abuse victims, per CDC data) more vulnerable by not equipping them with balanced awareness.
Lastly, social science confirms men are the ones who are wired as defenders—higher in vigilance and challenge to authority—making their alienation a self-sabotaging strategy. Women, averaging higher conformity, risk enabling institutional failures. VIRTUS’s male-shaming erodes this order, leaving children exposed.
In a Church that teaches all are fallen (Rom 3:23), this selective framing is scandalous. It doesn’t just fail children; it fails justice, signaling that only half of humanity needs scrutiny. If VIRTUS avoids clergy depictions to “generalize,” consistency demands female examples—yet their absence reveals the program’s roots in liberal risk-management templates, not Catholic equity.
- Broader Sociological Ramifications: Fostering a Culture of Suspicion That Undermines the Family and Faith
These representational flaws—clergy evasion, male shaming, female omission—aren’t isolated; they fuel a toxic social dynamic that corrodes the very structures VIRTUS claims to protect.
Sociological research from the Pew Research Center (2022) highlights how mandatory “safety” trainings in institutions contribute to declining trust in authority: 68% of parents report heightened anxiety in child-adult interactions post-exposure to such programs, with boys particularly affected by gender-specific stigma (linked to rising male youth depression rates, up 50% since 2010 per CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey). In the Church context, this manifests as parish attrition: A 2023 CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) study at Georgetown University found 15-20% of families citing intrusive safety protocols and administrative burdens (e.g., “bureaucratic demands of the parish”) as a factor in leaving PSR or active participation.
Worse, it entrenches passivity: By generalizing blame beyond clergy, VIRTUS diffuses rightful anger at the hierarchy, channeling it into horizontal suspicion among the laity. This mirrors America’s crisis of social capital, as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (published in 2000 but still disturbingly relevant) demonstrates—declining community bonds due to “risk-averse” policies that prioritize litigation over fraternity. In Catholic families, it inverts ordered loves (Augustine’s City of God), making strangers the focus while hierarchy escapes scrutiny.
Ultimately, this training doesn’t end the scandal; it extends it. The clergy’s sins demand penitent focus on their reform—not videos that shame the laity’s men and boys, erase women’s accountability, and leave sociological scars on trust and family cohesion. Dig into the USCCB audits, CDC stats, or DOJ reports anyone; the discrepancies scream for correction.
- Modesty and the Virtue of Chastity: A Direct Assault on Thomistic Moral Formation
St. Thomas Aquinas defines scandal as leading others into sin, particularly through words or actions that undermine virtue (Summa Theologica II-II, q. 43). VIRTUS training scandalizes by compelling catechists to introduce young children to explicit concepts like “private parts,” “inappropriate touching,” and bodily boundaries in a group setting, outside the family’s intimate guidance. This isn’t mere awareness; it’s a classroom dissection of innocence that plants seeds of shame or curiosity prematurely.
The program’s videos and discussions force children to view their bodies through a hyper-vigilant, almost forensic lens—labeling areas as “bathing suit zones” or equivalents. This clinical jargon clashes with the Church’s emphasis on the body’s dignity as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19-20), twisting natural affection (e.g., a parent’s hug) into potential suspicion. As the Vatican’s The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality (1995) states, such exposure risks “contaminating” the “years of innocence” (paras. 82-84), fostering an unnatural self-consciousness that hinders the integrated formation of chastity.
Unlike parental teaching, which can be tailored and prayerful, VIRTUS mandates delivery in a mixed-age PSR class. This exposes children to peers’ reactions—giggles, questions, or discomfort—turning personal moral education into a public spectacle. It’s a recipe for normalizing adult topics among kids, undermining the veiled, gradual unveiling of sexuality that tradition reserves for maturity.
These issues alone reveal VIRTUS as a Trojan horse for secular sex ed, repackaged under “safety,” making the scandal evident without deep digging.
- Psychological Harm and Developmental Mismatch: Confusing Immature Minds
Children’s cognitive and emotional stages aren’t one-size-fits-all, yet VIRTUS applies a uniform script from kindergarten up, ignoring how it can distort trust and perception.
The training hammers “stranger danger” and “tell an adult” mantras, but it broadly implicates all adults—including priests, teachers, and relatives—in potential harm. This erodes the filial confidence Scripture commands (e.g., Eph 6:1-4), replacing it with a litigious mindset. For a 6-year-old, equating a doctor’s exam with “bad touch” risks paralyzing normal interactions, fostering anxiety or withdrawal rather than security.
Introducing abuse vocabulary to suggestible young minds invites misinterpretation of innocent events. Psychological studies (e.g., on suggestibility in child interviews, as noted in Catholic critiques like those from catholicparents.org) show how leading questions in such programs can create false narratives. A child might retroactively “remember” a pat on the back as suspicious, leading to unfounded reports that traumatize families and volunteers. This isn’t protection; it’s priming for division, with real-world examples in dioceses where opt-outs spiked after such incidents surfaced.
VIRTUS doesn’t account for cultural, familial, or temperamental differences. A child from a devout home might internalize this as a loss of sacramental purity, while another fixates on the forbidden. The Catechism (CCC 2521-2524) calls for chastity education to respect “the personal conditions of each,” but VIRTUS steamrolls this with scripted videos, as evidenced by parent testimonials in forums and articles (e.g., the 2020 catholicparents.org piece warning of “stripping away innocence”).
These flaws are glaring: Pull up VIRTUS’s youth modules online, and the developmental insensitivity jumps out—no customization, just compliance checklists.
- Ecclesial and Cultural Overreach: A Modernist Drift from Tradition
VIRTUS embodies a post-Vatican II bureaucratic creep, prioritizing secular risk management over the Church’s organic moral pedagogy.
Historic Church formation (e.g., in St. Augustine’s Confessions or Aquinas’s emphasis on virtue ethics) integrated boundary teaching into prayer, confession, and family life—not isolated “awareness sessions.” VIRTUS’s corporate roots (developed in 1998 by the Catholic Risk Retention Group, as detailed on virtusonline.org) import insurance lingo (“risk control,” “best practices”) into the sanctuary, diluting the supernatural focus of catechesis.
Similar to public school programs (e.g., “Talking About Touching”), it smuggles progressive norms—ambiguous on gender roles, silent on sin’s spiritual dimension—into Catholic spaces. Neighboring dioceses’ CMGConnect variant amplifies this with digital tracking, turning kids into data points. This aligns with broader cultural pressures, as warned in Amoris Laetitia (para. 259), where Francis urges guarding family education from “ideological colonization.”
Opting out requires proactive effort, burdening vigilant parents while passive ones comply. This inverts subsidiarity (CCC 1911), making the diocese a de facto educator for the complacent. In a culture war context, it normalizes institutional intrusion, paving the way for more (e.g., DEI-infused modules).
Church history books and canon law commentaries (e.g., on Canon 216’s association rights) lay this bare: VIRTUS isn’t apostolic tradition; it’s a 21st-century liability fix.
- Economic Exploitation and the Perpetuation of a Litigious Culture
In conclusion, we can zoom out and observe that VIRTUS contributes to a paranoid, litigious society at odds with Christian charity. By framing every interaction as potential risk, it fosters isolation—kids learn to suspect rather than forgive (contra Mt 18:15-17). This mirrors America’s breakdown in family and parish bonds, where fear replaces fraternity. Insurers profit from dioceses’ fear, with VIRTUS fees embedded in premiums. Bishops comply to avoid bankruptcy, but at what cost? It’s a racket where children’s souls fund corporate bottom lines. These patterns are self-evident in annual reports from groups like the National Catholic Risk Retention Group—follow the money, and the priorities crystallize. This isn’t stewardship; it’s a financial shell game that exploits the faithful to cover clerical failures.
In light of these manifold objections—each verifiable through Church documents, statistical audits, and program materials—I would urge immediate review and suspension of VIRTUS-style mandates. For parents and volunteers, I would urge resistance and a movement toward independent catechesis so as to shrug off any overzealous interference. The Church’s witness demands better: True protection of children is rooted in faith, family, and fidelity, not corporate checklists.
Complaints as loud and lengthy as this letter might be few and far between, but there are plenty of less literary parents and volunteers murmuring about it. Please do not let spreadsheets and self-preservation erode what little trust remains in diocesan oversight. The fruit of moral cowardice is bitter, and many of us grow tired of choking it down.
Sincerely,
Daniel Schwindt
Husband, father of four children
daniel.schwindt (at) gmail.com
