Damon-Affleck Flick Protested

12/28/1998 at 12:00 AM EST

Following weekend demonstrations against a Brooklyn Museum art exhibition (in which an artist speckled his portrait of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung), hundreds of Catholic protesters staged a rally Monday at another venerable New York arts institution, Lincoln Center, where a controversial film was premiering. In director Kevin Smith's satirical "Dogma," Matt Damon and Ben Affleck play two fallen angels who are scheming to get back into heaven. The film has raised the ire of some Catholics. (Smith, a practicing Catholic himself, is baffled by the uproar -- but joked at a press conference last week that he's glad he removed his film's elephant dung scene.) Singing, praying and holding aloft placards that read "Stop blasphemy," the demonstrators gathered outside Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, where "Dogma" was being shown as part of the New York Film Festival.