By BOB CAMPBELL

"Dogma" should bear a postscript: "No souls were lost in the making of this movie."

Nor will any be scarred by seeing Kevin Smith's high-risk religious burlesque. Sensibilities are a different matter.

Self-appointed inquisitors may stand down. There's plenty to offend the ear and eye in Smith's giddy satire, but no stones are hurled at the Almighty. In fact, this foul-mouthed farce is the most God- friendly entertainment in eons. It exposes films like "Simon Birch" and the recent "angel" projects as the work of Pharisees.

Catholics may be simultaneously amused and appalled. For all its mischievous tweaking of Mother Church, Smith's story rests on an absolute faith in angels, holy water and even papal infallibility.

Replying to a doubter's questions, God's sarcastic advance agent Metatron (Alan Rickman) characterizes the Creator as "lonely ... but funny. Great sense of humor."

Metatron's own humor is running thin. His questioner, Linda Fiorentino's over-intense Bethany, has just smothered his blazing arrival with a fire extinguisher. It is one of the film's relatively elegant slapstick bits, and the lead-in to a fairly weighty scene.

Rickman's haughty archangel summons Fiorentino's bitter ex-Catholic abortion worker (push those buttons, Kevin!) to a sacred crusade. En route, the unbeliever will discover that God has written her a very special role. Bethany's pilgrimage leads from Ohio to a New Jersey cathedral.

Her mission is to prevent two fallen angels, Matt Damon's pagan-named Loki and Ben Affleck's seething Bartleby, from participating in a Vatican-approved initiative called "Catholicism WOW!" No more morbidity. A bleeding, "depressing" Christ gives way to a thumbs-up "buddy Jesus."

Smith knows his church history. To crown the new creed in style, superslick Jersey Cardinal Glick (straight-faced George Carlin) has won the pope's blessing to revive the Middle Ages' plenary indulgence. Anyone entering his church on Catholicism WOW!'s launch date will be automatically cleansed of sin.

Loki and Bartleby stop bickering (Damon and Affleck are a proven doubles act) upon spotting a "loophole" in God's decree of eternal banishment. By passing through Glick's arches, and then dying without further blemish, they can re-enter heaven by the back door. There is, though, an incidental side effect. By exploiting this paradox in holy writ they'll reverse the order of creation and cancel out all history.

God (played alternately by Bud Cort and Alanis Morissette) is strangely absent, so Metatron takes it on himself to team Bethany with two bottom-feeding "prophets" (Smith's signature clowns, Jason Mewes' sex-crazed stoner Jay and Smith's own taciturn Silent Bob), the unlisted ex-apostle Rufus (comedian Chris Rock) and a heavenly being turned hoochy-koocher (Salma Hayek).

Supercool Jason Lee hovers behind the scenes as the hipsterish demon Azrael, busily laying land mines along the crusaders' holy road.

Smith's first big-name cast includes more stars than he can use. Rock's Rufusian goal of proving that Jesus was black fades away, and Hayek's Serendipity is a gorgeous irrelevance.

As Damon's impish Loki refreshes his old skills as Angel of Death to sexual miscreants, Bethany's Christian soldiers battle a Boschian (or Mel Brooksian) excrement demon.

The writer-director takes on the film's dumbest gags as staunch Silent Bob. In a Smith movie, that's saying a lot. Though his movie hews to the outline of a solemn religious parable, the renegade Smith refuses to surrender his Idiot Boy franchise on bathroom gags, outrageous raunch and near-liturgical obscenity.

Anyone who considers the Smithian style a modernist disgrace should reread Aristophanes, who perfected this high- low, sacred-profane, anything-goes satirical mode in fifth century B.C. Athens. Filmmaker Smith is generally clever enough to cover up an admitted visual weakness embodied in choppy, static scenes interrupted by state-of-the-art optical effects.

If all else fails, consider "Dogma" a comic action thriller featuring theology in place of launch codes. The Lord green lights movies in mysterious ways.

Rated R: Free-flowing obscenities, shock images and high-intensity raunch.