For over 40 years, six people from Medjugorje, a small town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, have claimed to see and speak with the Virgin Mary. For almost as long, hordes of pilgrims have traveled to visit sites of the virgin’s alleged appearance and to observe the seers’ daily trances.

The Vatican has never approved the pilgrimage or issued any official judgment of the visionaries – until now.

Scholars have shown that Christians have claimed to see the virgin in dreams and visions since the fourth century. I have studied modern Marian apparitions for about 15 years and wrote a book about an American apparition.

Reports of Virgin Mary sightings escalated after 1800. Church leaders have rarely authenticated such claims, however, with the exception of some famous events at Lourdes, France, and Fátima, Portugal.

Of the roughly 500 apparitions reported between 1900 and 2000, the Catholic Church declared only 10 to be genuinely supernatural, based on the church’s exacting requirements for authenticity.

Earlier this year, though, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith – formerly the Inquisition and now the Vatican office responsible for protecting and promoting Catholicism – issued new norms for the discernment of alleged supernatural events.

As a result, the dicastery has declared that despite its previous skepticism, the pilgrimage to Medjugorje can still yield “spiritual fruits.” The decision does not mean, however, that the dicastery believes the apparitions to be genuinely supernatural – only the pope can make that decision.

Still, both the ruling and the way it came about are important changes in the history of apparitions.

In 1981, Medjugorje was a small farm town of about 14,000 people in the former Yugoslavia. On June 24 that year, six children, aged 11 to 16, told their families that they had seen the Gospa – Serbo-Croatian for the “Lady” – on the hill of Podbrdo near Medjugorje.........

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