The country's largest Catholic civil rights organization objects to the movie Dogma, opening Friday, but you won't find its 350,000 members marching outside theaters.

Sure, the Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights has specific gripes about the comedy, which stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as two angels banished to Earth who devise a way to return to heaven by using a loophole in Catholic law. Among the group's many objections: saying the Virgin Mary had sex.

But the Catholic League believes it has a better way to criticize.

"We are not gathering people to picket a particular theater, but we continue to shine the light of truth on this movie," says spokesman Patrick Scully about the comedy. "We are doing media interviews on almost an hourly basis, we have distributed books and we are issuing press releases."

In an era of seemingly infinite cable networks, Web sites and magazines, many groups are changing their strategy to express anger about a film. They go to the media, not the moviehouse.

"Protesters are more able to raise it to the level of discussion on talk shows and net works like MSNBC," says Chuck Kleinhans, director of graduate studies for Northwestern University's Radio/Television/Film program.

A good old-fashioned line of fervent protesters used to be enough.

In 1988, for instance, hundreds of pickets swarmed outside Universal Studios Florida to protest the studio's The Last Temptation of Christ before the movie's premiere - it didn't matter that the Orlando amusement park hadn't even opened yet. At the studio's main office in Universal City, Calif., 25,000 pickets came out the day before the picture's release, and the next day, protesters spread across the USA to express their anger at the Martin Scorsese-directed movie, which depicts a crucified Christ imagining that he married Mary Magdalene and had sex with her.

The attack on Temptation is just one of many high-profile movie protests to create controversy with picket lines. The tradition goes back as far as 1915, when the NAACP, then a fledgling group, organized a grass-roots-level attack on D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. The protest, which went on for years, cast (bold)Nation (/bold)as a film with racist overtones.

Since then, groups have picketed films such as 1960's La Dolce Vita (for sexual content), 1980's Cruising (for stereotyping homosexuals) and 1995's Showgirls (for immorality).

One reason for pounding-the-pavement's diminishing popularity: modern release patterns. Before the era of the big-event films, movies were released in a few hundred sites and would gradually expand. Protesters could picket a large percentage of theaters during a film's first few weeks, and if the commotion caused the movie to falter, it might not expand as widely. Now, even midsize films start at 1,500 to 2,000 sites.

"It is much harder to get grass-roots action in so many places," says Kleinhans. "Things come out so fast that they are a phenomenon by the time anybody can organize anything."

And Preston Noell, a spokesman for the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, says a seemingly simple protest is more complicated these days. He says the Catholic group, which is planning to picket Dogma, must be "cautious in this current climate." The reason, he says, is a 1998 court decision on abortion rallies that ruled protesters broke racketeering laws by hindering clinics' ability to do business.

Now, along with traditional letter-writing campaigns, directly courting the media to criticize a film has become a preferred alternative.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, for example, tried to get 20th Century Fox and filmmaker Edward Zwick to alter The Siege, which the organization considered insensitive to Arabs. Zwick and the studio made some concessions, but not enough for the largest American-Arab group in the country.

Although there was some picketing, about "65%-70%" of the organization's efforts focused on talking to film critics and political journalists, says Hussein Ibish, the group's communications director. The spokesman is quick to add that "The Siege was rejected by most of the important film critics."

The Catholic League has taken a similar approach with Dogma. League representatives have appeared on TV's Extra, and their concerns have been aired in such publi- cations as US magazine, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, New York Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times. The organization also took out an advertisement in The New York Times condemning the movie and inundated the film's original owner, Disney, with angry mail.

In April, producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who also received letters of protest, personally bought the rights to the film. (Dogma belonged to Miramax, the Disney subsidiary the brothers founded and run.)

The film's writer/director, Kevin Smith, is convinced that a scared Disney, which wouldn't comment on this matter, would have dumped his movie, now being released by independent distributor Lions Gate.

"Disney would have buckled like a belt within a week," Smith says. "Harvey would have gotten a call to shelve" the movie.

"Disney positions itself as family-oriented," he says. "Disney is everywhere, and you can definitely strike at them by boycotting the theme parts or canceling subscriptions to the Disney Channel."

Other studios are in similar situations. Because they are parts of huge conglomerates that have broader interests to protect, most studios have become skittish about controversial films. They either try to protect against religious, ethnic or "family values" groups criticizing their films or they avoid the most contentious fare altogether.

DreamWorks consulted with hundreds of religious leaders before releasing The Prince of Egypt a year ago. And, under pressure from its parent companies at the time, Seagram and Universal, October Films last year found an independent distributor for its movie Happiness, which, among other sensitive issues, depicted pedophilia.

"There is a wisening up at the corporate and studio level because of the past protests," says Charles Lyons, who wrote the book The New Censors: Movies and the Culture Wars. "Now, the most controversial films tend to be smaller ones" made by independent companies.

That is a marked change from just a decade ago, when Universal stuck by The Last Temptation of Christ. "I felt we had to back Marty Scorsese," says Tom Pollock, who was chairman of Universal Pictures when the studio released the drama. "Had we yielded to protest, we would have done a disservice to all filmmakers."

While bad press can hurt a studio in other aspects of business, often a movie that is attacked is bolstered at the box office, Lyons says. "The trouble with protests is that, although you get a point across to the movie's makers, you also end up attracting more business."

A film like Cinema screens its complaintsDressed to Kill in 1980, he says, ended up being helped by women who protested that the movie eroticized violence. The Last Temptation of Christ, which cost an estimated $6.5 million to make, brought in $8.4 million. But The Siege, made for a reported $70 million, grossed just $41 million in the USA.

Hurting a film financially isn't the only reason groups protest. They also use individual movies as a way to address broader issues.

"The overall goal is bigger than the movie Dogma," says the Catholic League's Scully about his group's current crusade. "It is to raise awareness to the point where Hollywood writers, directors, etc., don't see the Catholic Church as something to beat up on."

For Smith, the league's effort to address greater concerns has done nothing but misrepresent and hurt his movie, the filmmaker says.

The only thing "the attention has brought the movie is infamy," he says. "Maybe it builds an awareness, but it's an awareness to a film that doesn't exist - to a movie that the Catholic League says it is. Dogma is not a polemic; it is a piece of entertainment."