Overlooking Mgarr harbour in Gozo is an imposing church dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. According to the Catholic Church, in 1854 Our Lady appeared to a small child in Lourdes, France, and gave her a message of Christian hope. Ironically, behind Lourdes Church in Mgarr is Lourdes Home, an institution in which hundreds of children without parents spent their childhood, and where Christian hope seems to have been missing.

Seven parentless children who lived in Lourdes Home and are now adults are alleging that they were physically and psychologically abused for a number of years by one or more of the nuns administering it.

From the testimonies they will be giving on this Tuesday’s Bondiplus, a picture of alleged systematic abuse emerges. These men and women claim that they were force fed their own vomit, burned, beaten and had their teeth and bones broken, were intentionally ridiculed in front of their peers and lived in constant fear of some of the nuns.

Equally significantly, these seven men and women allege that when they sought the protection of the Curia in Gozo in 1999, their pleas fell on deaf ears.

The nun most mentioned by those who have spoken out is still serving at the home and has, they say, recently been given a promotion.

A woman, who is now aged 34, has stated that this nun used to kick her in the stomach and, when the girl accidentally dropped some oil on the floor, was made to clean the place up by mopping it with her own hair. Then she was made to sleep next to the rubbish bins. It was this same nun, the woman claims, who invented nicknames for most of the children.

The nuns always had good food and heaters in winter, the former inmates claim, while the children had food brought by people living outside the home, and no heaters in winter.

Another woman, now aged 35, has claimed that when she was six or seven years old, she befriended a dog, for which she was soundly beaten and made to wash a large pot full of bedsheets. And when her own mother called to see her, on one of the two or so occasions a year set aside for such meetings, the nun refused to allow her to do so.

A man told how he wet his bed out of fear when he was seven, for which he was scorned and ridiculed in front of his colleagues, forced to have a cold shower and sent to school in a nappy.

“We can never find happiness”, the former inmates uniformly state, “not even after we came away from there.”

Bondiplus has conducted a thorough investigation of this affair and will raise a number of questions. If the allegations are true, how is such abuse conceivable in a home run by nuns? If the diocesan authorities in Gozo were aware of what was going on, why did they fail to act, particularly when the same children told them about it in 1999, when they were grown up?

Is such a matter to be dealt with by the Church or the police? Will justice be done and if so, how? On the legal front, if these allegations are found to be true, what should happen to the perpetrators?

If these are seven victims of abuse, as they allege, will they be entitled to financial compensation, as has been the case in the UK and the US?

Bondiplus has invited on to the programme both the former bishop of Gozo, Mgr Nikol Cauchi, and the new bishop, Mgr Mario Grech, as well as other priests and religious, but it is still unclear if any of them will accept the invitation. The alleged victims will be speaking – at least two of them without covering their faces.