For anyone who hasn’t been following the extremely drawn out saga concerning Catholic Online, Catholic Financial Services, Michael Galloway and his various escapades, you can get some background here. Basically, he scammed multiple organizations, including some nuns and a marriage rehabilitation organization out of thousands of dollars. It took us over a year to get our money back from his Catholic Financial Services scam.

You can read more of the local Bakersfield coverage here.

He decided today to settle out of court instead of going to trial. He has to pay some hefty monthly fines to pay back those he still owes money to and could possibly, if he fails to do that, lose the Catholic.org domain which I am sure would fetch a hefty price.

We just received the following email:

Dear Catholic Communicator:

As a fellow communicator, we want to personally extend an invitation to become a part of making history.

In his visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI called for a “New Pentecost.”

In response to this call – and the continuing call of the Church to use all of the “new technologies” for the “New Evangelization” – Catholic Online, a global integrated media network, has launched The Catholic Media Association (TCMA).

The Catholic Media Association exists to provide a virtual home and association-based community for faithful Catholics involved in any and all forms of media.

We now live in an era of integrated communication, and with this we are given an even greater responsibility for the proper stewardship of these tools. “Technology” is not an “add-on” to our communication or our community; it is an extension of the person, the family and our communities with no limitations.

This is the new world of social networking, where the old differentiation of media no longer exists. Print, radio, TV, and the worldwide web are now integrated with the newer technologies of video-casting, podcasting, blogging, and the world of social networking. We now have a more united media available for a unified message – the message of the Gospel, as lived in it’s fullness in the heart of the Church.

This is the world of TCMA.

Dedicated to the Servant of God John Paul II, Patron of the New Media, the motto of TCMA reveals our mission: “New Technologies for the New Evangelization.” Our vision is exciting – we see the need to place all communications technologies at the service of the person, the family, the Church and the culture. This is our business and our passion. The use of every communicative advance is integral to the “New Evangelization”. We will be satisfied with nothing less.

Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have both challenged all who are baptized, whatever their state of life, to fully participate in the New Missionary Age in which we live. They have used rich phrases such as “New Evangelization” “New Springtime” and a “New Pentecost” to speak of the universal call to missionary activity. Media and technology are two of the greatest resources we have available for this work.

We are inviting you to join us in this exciting endeavor.

• Are you involved in the more traditional expressions, such as print, television, radio, and the Internet?
• Are you a part of the wonderful new world of Web 2.0 and beyond, through blogging, podcasting, video-casting, and other forms of social networking?

Whatever your expertise and interest, TCMA can provide a foundation and forum for your work in media and theChurch.

Join The Catholic Media Association today.

CLICK HERE – THE CATHOLIC MEDIA ASSOCIATION

To find out more about who we are and what we offer to you right now.

For the New Evangelization through the New Media,

Michael Galloway , Publisher Catholic Online
Deacon Keith Fournier, Editor-in-Chief Catholic Online

If you have any urge to join this association, please refrain. Michael Galloway is currently facing multiple fraud charges and if convicted, could go to federal prison for the theft of thousands of dollars from various organizations including Hurricane Katrina relief money for the Diocese of New Orleans. If you want to read the case, it is a very lengthy complaint against Michael Galloway, Catholic Online, Catholic Financial Services, Your Catholic Voice and Your Catholic Voice Foundation. He is also facing prosecution by the IRS, the state of California and Kern County for over $300,000 in unpaid taxes.

If that isn’t enough, he kept all the funds collected for the Chant Art project, an online image repository, that he was hosting instead of giving them to the owner and then had the gall to send her a bill for several thousand dollars when she told him to shut down the program.

Deacon Keith Fournier, if you are really still involved with this organization, it’s time to publicly disown Michael Galloway and Catholic Online. Your continued association just makes the Church look bad.

In case you have missed the ongoing saga with Catholic Online, you can read past problems here.

For those who still aren’t convinced that this organization (which still owes us several hundred dollars and is due in court in August on multiple counts of fraud) is bad, you can read the compiled list of liens filed by various government agencies here. Between the IRS, the state of California and Kern County, Michael Galloway and Catholic Online owe over $300,000 in back taxes and fines. This is apart from the money owed to various dioceses, organizations and religious orders that Catholic Financial Services has been holding for a couple of years. If you want the nitty-gritty of the whole case, here it is.

If you are actually paying this organization for advertising, I would recommend you stop. The local tv station is planning on airing an expose on the whole situation soon and being associated with the company when that happens won’t be beneficial to your image.

The poor lady who runs a website selling old images has had her work stolen by Catholic Online and sold in their Chant Art section for over a year (taken offline since last week) without compensating her even though she is still listed as the owner in their user agreement. We also know that the company added the old Catholic Encyclopedia to their website simply to spite the owner of New Advent (Michael Galloway told me this directly). Here is a link to a pdf of the entire complaint filed with the Kern County DA about Catholic Online. It’s a very disturbing list of accusations. We can vouch that many of them are true from first-hand experience.

• was holding several thousand dollars of your money.
• hadn’t released the money to you even though you had requested its dispersement three months earlier.
• doesn’t ever answer the phone.
• doesn’t ever respond to voice mail.
• doesn’t ever respond to email unless you make threats.
• lies about receiving documentation you sent.
• does not follow its own dispute resolution policy.

I think that would be called theft and fraud and such a company should be shut down and exposed publicly for stealing peoples’ money.

But then again, this is Catholic land so organizations such as Catholic Financial Services and its parent company Catholic Online will most likely never be exposed for criminal behavior outside of this blog.

Update: Back on May 9th Catholic Financial Services acknowledged receipt of our completed forms and said that our withdrawal request was being resubmitted. Today (May 24th) we received all of our paperwork back from the post office unopened with an “unclaimed” note attached. This means that a) CFS lied about getting our mailed paperwork and b) They haven’t checked their P.O. Box for about three weeks.

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Following up on our dealings with Catholic Financial Services (Catholic Online) here and here, shows that things haven’t changed a bit with the company. A month after we started asking for a reason why we weren’t getting our money we received a note that a $2 transaction had been revoked by the sender and that was holding up our transaction of several thousand dollars. When I said that we would be happy to have the transaction decreased by that amount so we could get the rest of the money, we were told that we had never filled out all the paperwork for our account.

I filled out the paperwork and overnighted it to them as well as faxed it. Then I waited. No response. I sent them a couple of notes and was told that our transaction was being put back in process. That was on May 9th. It is now 22 days later and follow up requests for a date when we will receive our money have been ignored. I filled out their official dispute resolution form last Sunday and received an automated reply that I would here back within 48 hours. It has now been three days.

The only other correspondence I have received from them is a threat to legal action against our company for posting about our experience dealing with them.

If you currently advertise with Catholic Online I strongly suggest stopping. If you were thinking about it, think again. This company is bad news.

Well, it has now been three weeks since we tried to withdraw our money from Catholic Financial Services (CFS). It has been one week since we started calling and emailing both CFS and Catholic Online asking why we don’t have the money yet. To date there hasn’t been a response.

However, we did receive an interesting note on Monday. I can’t go into the details but you never want to see your business’ name followed by words like “lien”, “levy” and “IRS”. You also don’t want to do a search for words like that online and find that other government agencies have put your company name together with those words.

As nice an idea as it was to have a Catholic alternative to Paypal, if you want to see your money again, don’t even think about signing up with Catholic Financial Services or doing business with Catholic Online in any fashion.

Please pray that the organization is able to right its ship and regain its commitment to orthodoxy which it seemed to be losing over the past year. Catholic Online has been a valuable source of information almost since the beginning of the Internet and it would be a shame for it fail.

After having to threaten legal action in order to get our Catholic Liturgical Library data released to us last month after they shut down the site without warning, Catholic Online (Catholic.org) has figured out a way to outdo themselves in the poor customer service realm.

Catholic Online created a company called Catholic Financial Services which is basically a Paypal knock-off. A couple of years ago we were in talks with them to use Catholic Financial Services as a payment option on our website. Fortunately, they broke all our agreements and we never implemented the integration. However, we did keep our account open for possible future testing.

When people give money to Catholic Online, they are given an option of giving money through Catholic Financial Services to a member business / charity. We have had a few people give us money in this manner. On the 17th of March we requested a withdrawal of funds from Catholic Financial Services. This last Wednesday our accountant said that the money never came through so I went on-line and found that the funds were “processing” – twelve days later.

I called CFS and left a voice message on Wednesday. I called and left a voice message on Thursday with both Catholic Financial Services and Catholic Online and sent CFS an email asking why the funds hadn’t been transferred. I also spoke to a rep at Catholic Online who said she would pass along the message. Today, still having not received a reply, I called CFS and actually got a live person. This is the first time in over a year that I have ever gotten a live person on the line there. I asked for a status on my funds and was put on hold. For HALF AN HOUR. I hung up and called Catholic Online again and was told to leave a message on the CFS voicemail. I asked to speak to Art Marquez, their director of IT and was put on hold for fifteen minutes before being dumped to voicemail.

Now all calls I make go directly to voicemail.

If anyone out there is considering doing business with either Catholic Online (catholic.org) or Catholic Financial Services (catholicfs.org), think twice. These people have no qualms in breaking their word and have a total disregard for customer service. They make honest Catholics look bad.

A couple of weeks ago we sent a request to Catholic.org, our former host for catholicliturgy.com, to send us our database for the site because we wanted to bring the hosting back in house. We never received a reply so we made another request last week. Again there was no reply but today, without warning, they shut down the Catholic Liturgy site. I have now sent a third request for our database and mailing list and still have not received a reply. The site will be back up as soon as this issue is resolved.

UPDATE: We would like to do an overhaul of the Catholic Liturgical Library site in the next few months. What would you like to see?

Update 2: We have finally been sent our database but are still waiting on our mailing list. Our sales manager called and apologized today for the “mixup” and lack of communication. While I am sure that she was sincere about the lack of communication since it appears that she informed tech support multiple times about the request, the complete lack of contact by the company concerning the deactiviation of the domain and the failure to reply to any of my communications until I mentioned legal action is not excusable.

I do not recommend that anyone do business with Catholic.org as they have repeatedly broken promises over the last two years, ignored tech support requests for weeks and now shut down a website without warning and without turning the data back over to the proper owners.