Let's discuss this one and the following: 

I do not think this user story will fly. We have to consider that just because someone signs up for a parish group, that does not authorize the diocese to send out messages to these users or add them to a group. I think also this story will force us to have some hard-wired groups in order to ensure it all works. 

I think we need a structure where the Diocese creates their own groups and can send to those people only. We could automatically allow the Diocese to send a message to all parish admins, but I think we need to maintain that a Parish gets to choose to promote the message to its parishioners. The Diocese can promote getting people or certain types of ministers to join their groups.

If we allow the Diocese to simply adopt all the parishioners as their own users without permission, we run the risk of parishes opting out. Perhaps we make this optional and can enable or disable it for a specific diocese?

We talked about this one a few weeks back. One of the ideas tossed around was writing the terms & conditions to be something along the lines that by signing up they onto receive communications from entities within the diocese. I probably don’t like that one though. But I think your correct in that the diocese has to create their own groups, asking users to join. They don’t get to just utilize all of the groups that the churches have created.