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 on Thursday gave the green light for Catholics to continue flocking to a southern Bosnian village where children reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary.

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.

After 40 years of studies, commissions and contradictions, the Vatican finally approved the spiritual devotion of the faithful at the Marian site at Medjugorje, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a document issued on Thursday.

Pope Francis has expressed some doubts on the messages, commenting in 2013 on the Virgin Mary’s particularly chatty nature at Medjugorje.

Vatican gives green light to devotion at Bosnian site in Medjugorje where Virgin Mary is said to have appeared.

Catholic worshipers who claim to have seen and spoken to the Virgin Mary at a Bosnian landmark received mixed messages from the Vatican on Thursday after the Church refused to say whether their visions were real — while still supporting worship at the site.