An image of the nuns was posted on Instagram last week and the Sex Party released it and another photograph to the media on Friday.

Sex Party leader Fiona Patten said the pair of sisters seemed "hell-bent" on tearing down the words "tax the church" from a pole in Collingwood.

"Our policy to tax the Church is fair and reasonable, especially where it applies to the Church's profit-making businesses," Ms Patten said on Friday.

"If the nuns would like to visit me and confess, that will be an end to it."

The Sex Party said the sisters also tore a poster calling for legalised medical marijuana.

The Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne's media and communications director, Shane Healy, said interfering with election posters could not be condoned.

"[But] no one should be at all surprised that sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, established by Mother Teresa of Calcutta to feed and support the poorest of the poor, would be taking offence at the policies of the Sex Party," he said.

Sex Party Senate candidate Meredith Doig said the whole act was "pathetic".

"It's a bit of a flashback to the past of some sort of sanctimonious 19th century era women's temporary union," Dr Doig said.

"Honestly, in this day and age, you got to think about what's going through their minds and how engaged they are with society."

During the New South Wales state elections last year, Sex Party signs were removed from a church that was being used as a polling booth.

This was reportedly because church workers believed they were the work of the devil.

Sources

• The Guardian
• SBS
• Stuff.co.nz
• Image: SBS

Above the image of one of the women priests were the words "some women disobey".

The putting up of the posters in Rome's Trastevere neighbourhood and near St Peter's was part of a "jubilee for women priests".

All of the women pictured are "essentially under excommunication", the Guardian reported.

Kate McElwee, co-executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference, said the metre-high posters are meant to celebrate female priests around the world.

They may help spur a dialogue with the Church about women's equality, she said.

Ms McElwee sees this as a "true blind spot for Pope Francis".

In 1994, St John Paul II declared "that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful".

Pope Francis has said the ordination of women as priests "cannot be done", citing St John Paul II.

The city of Rome agreed to put the women priest posters up.

Organisers said they had found an enthusiastic supporter within the city government who had promised to save "good space" for them even though they are competing with political posters before the upcoming mayoral election.

According to Ms McElwee, there are about 150 renegade female priests around the world.

Many of them were ordained after a group of women known as the Danube Seven were ordained illegally in 2002 by an Argentinian bishop.

The posters were created by Italian photographer Giulia Bianchi.

She said meeting a woman priest helped heal the "Catholic child inside herself" and "a lot of pain and scars I have from the official Church".

A petition calling on Pope Francis to lift the excommunications of women priests will be delivered by a woman priest to the Vatican on June 3.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Action Groundswell Movement
• Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Xania News