The Antichrist, a.k.a. filmmaker Kevin Smith, has terrible table manners.

He lifts his breakfast omelette off the plate with his fingers, which he also uses to flick aside unwanted tomatoes. He's dressed shabbily for the Park Hyatt's penthouse restaurant: A worn T-shirt struggles to hide flab beneath an equally exhausted sweater. He gets points, though, for doffing his baseball cap.

Smith hardly seems the sinister ``man of wealth and taste'' Mick Jagger sang about in ``Sympathy For The Devil.''

Nor does he look like the blasphemer conservative Roman Catholics have accused of trying to smash their 2,000-year-old Church with his religious satire, Dogma.

He's more like Silent Bob, the slacker character he plays in his movies, than he is Son of Beelzebub.

Smith spends his free time going to comic book conventions and Star Wars films and playing with his new baby daughter. He wouldn't be caught dead at a black Mass.

But looks are deceiving, as both Smith and his detractors are quick to remind people.

The 29-year-old New Jersey writer/director is convinced that if people would just see Dogma, which hits theatres Friday, they'd realize that behind the profanity and flip remarks there's some serious soul-searching going on.

His opposition, led by William Donahue, president of the 350,000-member Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the United States, believes that what you don't see is what you get. Donahue has seen only the script of Dogma, not the movie, yet he's convinced Smith is the Antichrist incarnate.

Donahue has summoned all good Catholics to shun the film and vilify the filmmaker. As a result, Smith and movie studio Miramax have received hate mail and bomb threats, and the recent New York premiere of the movie was picketed by a mob inflamed by righteous fury.

Smith and his film were also burned by their own corporate masters. Last spring, Miramax was forced by its corporate owner, Disney, to sell Dogma to another distributor; Disney wanted no part of a film that could sully its family reputation. After much deal-making, Dogma was eventually picked up by Vancouver-based Lion's Gate.

Smith, sitting for a breakfast interview during the recent Toronto film fest, which screened Dogma, picks at some more eggs and sighs. ``If you want to attack me for being tacky, or for bawdy humour, or even being tasteless, that's fine,'' says the practising Catholic and former altar boy, whose previous three films Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy were indeed tacky, bawdy and tasteless - as well as hugely popular.

``But attacking me as anti-Catholic or anti-faith with this movie, it's just f---ing nuts. It bends my mind. Go and see the movie!''

Ironically, before all the fury began, Smith was worried that Dogma was too Catholic. ``It's maybe one of the most inside movies ever made. A layman is going to sit there at times going, `What?' Hopefully, we've done the `idiot's version' and explained and over-explained everything to make sure everybody gets the concept. But come on. Anti-Catholic? Heavens!''

Dogma doesn't stint on the satire. It's a story of two renegade angels, played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who want to use a loophole in Church doctrine to trick God and con their way back into Heaven. The figures they meet include a trash-talking 13th apostle, an abortion clinic worker with a shocking connection to Christ and a giant ``poop monster.'' They also find God Herself, played by pop star Alanis Morissette.

Smith calls Dogma ``a love letter to God'' because it raises sincere issues about faith that many Catholics prefer not to discuss. He defends his use of profanity and scatological humour as being his way of reaching young people.

``Why preach to the f---ing choir?'' Smith says. ``Minister to the masses. Christ didn't stop at the apostles. He didn't have 12 guys and go, `Well, I've done my work. I'll just keep telling you guys stories.'

``Now granted, they killed Him for it, but He did what He wanted to do and what He was supposed to do. Christ's parting thoughts were to go out and spread the word. And with this movie, I thought I answered that call.''

Smith stubbornly, perhaps naively, believes he can reason with hard-liners. He believes this in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Art that challenges orthodox religious views is always attacked, and film seems to spark the most extreme reactions. In a century of movies, filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard (Hail Mary) to Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation Of Christ) to Monty Python (Life Of Brian) have angered fundamentalists.

Dogma is also controversial for its violence. In one graphic scene, Damon and Affleck gun down an entire boardroom of men in suits, accusing them of being godless capitalists.

The scene was filmed before the student shootings last April at Columbine High School in Colorado and the witch-hunt aftermath when Hollywood was blamed for promoting violence. Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein was so unnerved by the uproar, he wanted to cut the boardroom scene from the movie.

Smith held his ground. The scene was essential to the plot, he argued, and besides, too many people had already heard about it via the Internet. To cut it would be an act of cowardice. ``I appreciate the pain and misery of the people at Columbine,'' Smith says. ``But letting two outside loner dickheads (the shooters) dictate the terms of the story I wanted to tell, by virtue of the fact they were bored and unsatisfied or dissatisfied with their lives, would be like changing the content of the movie because Bill Donahue was upset.''

Smith won that round, possibly because Weinstein was getting ready to drop the film anyway. But Smith yielded to Weinstein's request that a disclaimer precede the showing of the film, telling people that Dogma is intended as satire and nothing more.

It bothers Smith, one of the icons of independent film, that his filmmaking has become so corporate and complicated. But he tries to look on the bright side of life, as the Monty Python gang sang during the Crucifixion scene in Life Of Brian.

``To me, the strongest proof of the existence of God is that I'm a filmmaker,'' Smith says.

``The fact that I'm working and I have a job like this. I haven't been thrown out yet.''