After decades, and controversy, the Vatican has authorized public worship at a shrine in Bosnia, where a once tranquil village has become a major pilgrimage site.

The Vatican is providing its long-awaited assessment on one of the more contested aspects of Roman Catholicism in recent years: the reported "apparitions" of the Virgin Mary at an otherwise unremarkable village in southern Bosnia.

The Vatican’s doctrine office didn’t declare that the reported apparitions in Medjugorje were authentic or of supernatural origin.

The Vatican said Thursday it recognised the shrine of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, without commenting on the Virgin's "alleged messages" to the faithful, who have gathered there in the millions for more than 40 years.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Francis has approved a Catholic spiritual devotion centred in Medjugorje, a town in Bosnia that has been steeped in controversy over whether the Virgin Mary appears to local people, the Vatican said on Thursday.

The Vatican has given the green light for Catholics to continue flocking to a southern Bosnian village where children reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary

The Vatican did not rule that the accounts that children and teenagers saw Mary in the village of Međugorje in 1981 were authentic, but it said that the spiritual experience of visiting the shrine justified pilgrimages there.