BANGOR – Wayne Weible was a skeptical journalist, publisher and a Lutheran Sunday school teacher in 1985 when he first heard that the Virgin Mary had appeared four years earlier to six Croatian children on a hillside in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia.

After a visit in 1986 to the tiny farming village now in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Weible was transformed from newspaper publisher to an expert on the Medjugorje miracle. He also converted to Catholicism. And he became the best-selling author of books about the messages the Virgin Mary has delivered regularly to those children, now grown.

Weible, 70, of Hiawassee, Ga., will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday at St. John’s Catholic Church in Bangor. He will tell the story of Medjugorje (pronounced med-jew-GOR-yay) and talk about how his life changed after he visited the rocky hillside that became a pilgrimage site.

He had planned to work until retirement age, sell his four weekly newspapers in North Carolina and relax. That changed when he wrote his first column about the apparitions at Medjugorje.

“I was going to write one story for my papers,” he said in a recent phone interview, “and while I watched the pilgrims gather, I felt the Blessed Mother speaking to my heart and felt her ask me to do her son’s will. I was so shocked and stunned.

“As a Lutheran, I looked askance on the Catholic faith,” Weible continued. “Suddenly the Catholic Mary was speaking to my heart. I did it, but after arguing from within for a long time. But I couldn’t get away from that message. Her point finally was – if you don’t do this someone else will. So I sold my business and shouted out loud, ‘Yes, I want to do this.'”

The messages given to the children, called seers or visionaries, he wrote in a newspaper column that is reprinted in his book, “Medjugorje, the Message,” are simple and direct. The vision called on humanity to return to ways of God, peace and prayer.

For the first 33 months, the apparition gave the children messages that were very informal and directed at people in the village but also very much for the world, Weible said in the interview. For about three years after that, there were weekly messages for the parish and then monthly messages.

One woman still receives monthly messages that are intended for the public. They are posted on the Medjugorje Web site. Weible also distributes them through his newsletter.

“When [the Blessed Virgin Mary] has stopped appearing to the youths – a time known only to them – a permanent sign will be left at Medjugorje,” he said in the interview last month. “It will lead to many healings and conversions in the short time left before the messages will become reality.”

Weible has made nearly 80 trips to Medjugorje and plans to return this month. Since news of the apparitions spread in the early 1980s, more than 30 million people from around the globe have visited the site, he said. Hundreds of businesses including motels, souvenir shops, bars, restaurants and clothing stores have sprung up to accommodate the large number of pilgrims.

“Yet, in the small triangle created by the hill where the Blessed Virgin first appeared to the children, St. James Church in the center of the village, and Cross Mountain with its beautiful cross that overlooks the valley,” Weible wrote in “Medjugorje, the Message,” “the purity of the messages continues to bring about spiritual conversion. Masses in many languages are held throughout each day, followed by a large gathering in the evening for the Croatian Mass. … Almost every pilgrim physically capable of doing so climbs the Hill of Apparition and Cross Mountain.”

Cross Mountain is a mount above the village where on March 15, 1934, the parishioners constructed a concrete cross built in remembrance of the 1,900 years since the death of Jesus.

The villagers named the apparition “The Queen of Peace,” Weible said, pointing out that that name is a sharp contrast to what has happened in the former Yugoslavia and the world since she first appeared. He feels that the Iraq war and ethnic conflicts around the world make the messages very relevant.

Weible also said that he understands what can happen to one individual who heeds the messages.

“This is the joy, the freedom, the security, the happiness, the peace we all seek when we can finally give it all up to God,” he said of how his own life has changed since his conversion.