Nicolas-Michel Krick (born March 1, 1819, in Lixheim, Meurthe, died September 1, 1854) was a priest from Lorraine who became a missionary with the Paris Foreign Missions Society in 1848. He was murdered with Augustin Bourry while attempting to reach Tibet.
Born into a Lorraine family with democratic political leanings, he entered the seminary in 1839 and was ordained priest in 1843. After a few years as a priest, he joined the Paris Foreign Missions. He was sent on a mission to Tibet with three other confreres. As it was impossible to reach Tibet via China, which forbade foreigners to enter its territory, they left for North India in order to discover a passage to Tibet via the South. After several months of unsuccessful attempts, Nicolas Krick became the first European to reach Tibet by this route. He wrote about his crossing of North India and his experiences in , then sent it to Paris. His Relation considerably advanced our then very limited knowledge of the Mishmi tribes and Tibet. After gaining access, he was forced to leave Tibet due to the threats he faced.
He returned to the Assam valley (North India) and fell ill. After several months of recovery, he returned to Tibet, accompanied by Augustin Bourry, a new missionary. They struggled to reach the Tibetan border, only to be murdered in circumstances that remain a mystery. His death was soon considered a martyrdom by Catholics.
While Nicolas Krick was best known for his Relation d'un voyage au Thibet par M. l'abbé Krick, the rapid conversion of Mishmi tribes to Christianity at the end of the 20th century gave Nicolas Krick and Augustin Bourry a new notoriety. With the two missionaries now considered by the new converts to be the founders of their Church, the local bishop decided to initiate the procedure for their beatification. They have been conferred the title of Servant of God in 2019.
Nicolas Krick's writings, and in particular his diary, are a reference for ethnologists studying the tribes of North India, particularly the Mishmis. His descriptions of places and local customs are the main written sources of the 19th century for these tribes, who have only oral traditions.
Biography
Youth Michel Krick married Élisabeth Dubourg, a gardener's daughter, and opened a tailor's store. Their first child was Catherine, born in 1816. On March 1, 1819, in Lixheim (Meurthe), Michel was born, actually named after his godfather: Nicolas. Three other children followed: Joseph in 1823, Nicolas Alexis in 1824 and Marie-Élisabeth in 1826. Marie-Élisabeth's birth in 1826 went badly, and Élisabeth died in childbirth. Nicolas Krick was orphaned at the age of seven. His father Michel married Anne Prévost, also a widow. Nicolas spent many hours in his father's store. The contact he had with his customers shaped his sensitivity to women, a trait that is easily reflected in his writings and sermons.
Very little information is available about Nicolas Krick's childhood and adolescence. However, his later writings make it clear that he grew up in a relatively liberal atmosphere, very much in favor of democracy and freedom. His father's wife, Anne Prévost, a former military wife, must have shared the ideas of her former Republican husband. Nicolas Krick's eclectic reading list ranges from Romantic writers like Chateaubriand to Voltaire and Rousseau.
He entered the major seminary in Nancy on November 4, 1839. Even if we don't know what Nicolas Krick was doing at the time, we do know that entrance to the seminary required knowledge of Latin. The son of a craftsman, Nicolas had a somewhat atypical profile, given that the seminary was mainly composed of the sons of notables and peasants.
The Nancy seminary is based on the Sulpician model, with training focused on devotional exercises, meditation and prayer. Studies focus on theology and Sacred Scripture. The Nancy seminary has adopted very rigorous and demanding rules. It also possesses a large library (the most extensive of any French seminary at the time), an asset for the intellectual dynamism of the establishment, which goes hand in hand with its great respect for individual freedom of thought. In one of his sermons, Nicolas Krick defended freedom of conscience, a favorite theme in the age of anticlericalism: "Those who believed that they were suffocating the Church itself by this means were far from foreseeing that this freedom of conscience, which in their hands was nothing but an instrument of destruction and death, was to serve the supreme triumph: religious truth."
In his fourth year at the seminary, his confrere was Augustin Schoeffler. They were born in neighboring towns and entered the Paris Foreign Missions. It was perhaps at this point that Nicolas Krick's missionary vocation was born. In 1842, he became a sub-deacon. On December 13, 1843, he was ordained deacon, and on June 1, 1844, priest, at the age of twenty-four, like most priests of his time.
Lorraine priest After his ordination, he was appointed vicar at Gerbéviller in Meurthe-et-Moselle, then in 1847 second vicar of Phalsbourg (Moselle), the parish where Augustin Schoeffler was originally from. Nicolas Krick wrote down all his sermons; seventy-two from the Gerbéviller and Phalsbourg periods are preserved in the archives of Foreign Missions. Their style shows that he was very demanding spiritually towards his parishioners.
In 1848, as the Revolutions shook Europe, Nicolas Krick kept a close eye on events in his parish: his homilies defended a liberal Catholicism, as evidenced by their titles "" ("Only religion gives true freedom") or "" ("Necessity of religion in democracy").
In his homilies, Nicolas Krick also showed himself to be an ardent patriot, a patriotism that did not prevent him from taking the necessary steps to become a missionary in Asia. On August 21, he announced his possible departure for the Paris Foreign Missions, and on October 28, 1848, he was accepted as an aspirant, along with Théophane Vénard and Augustin Bourry. During his years in Paris, he developed a close relationship with his followers. The correspondence he kept up after his departure shows that he maintained the friendships he had forged during this period of his life.
The Paris Foreign Missions
One possible explanation for his entry into the Paris Foreign Missions is his meeting with Augustin Schoeffler, who also joined. Another possible reason is his reading of the (Annals of the Propagation of the Faith), which recount the lives of missionaries, and were widely read at the time. His faith undoubtedly also played an important role, as did his abandonment to Providence and his meditations on the missions, which we discover in one of his homilies: "When man, by his submission to God's guidance, has elevated himself far beyond the sphere of his fears and hopes, thus enhancing the noble privilege of his reason by the kind of abandonment he makes of it into the hands of the One on whom he depends (...) I believe because God has spoken to me, because his apostles have spoken. I believe because thousands of martyrs have sealed with their blood the truths proposed to my faith." Nicolas Krick sees the missionary vocation as the pinnacle of the Christian life: "The servant is no more than the master, (...) to give one's life to announce the good news was the right path to heaven, (...) if those who throw themselves into fire, into water, into the mouth of the cannon to save mortal lives are rewarded, there is also a reward for the missionary."
The background to his entry into the Paris Foreign Missions was turbulent: the revolution of 1848 led to the establishment of the Second Republic in France. The previous year, Pope Gregory XVI had erected the Apostolic Vicariate of Lhasa (March 27, 1847), in Tibet, and entrusted it to the Paris Foreign Missions. Sending missionaries to Tibet was made difficult by opposition from the Buddhist Lamas.
Facing difficulties and opposition from the Chinese, the Missions' superiors sought to penetrate Tibet via the South, India and the Himalayas. This solution was favored by the fact that the vicar of Bengal was seeking to rid himself of responsibility for the Assam region, north of Kolkata: he saw in the arrival of the Paris Foreign Missions the possibility of relieving himself of this immense region where Catholics were few in number. The Assam region was attached to the Apostolic Vicariate of Lhasa.
Two problems remain. Firstly, no Westerner had ever crossed the Himalayas from the south to reach Tibet, and the missionaries had no information on how to get there. On the other hand, as this mission was quite difficult and dangerous, the superiors of the Paris Foreign Missions had to find relatively experienced people. After several months of gathering information on the most suitable candidates, they chose Julien Rabin, Nicolas Krick and Louis Bernard, all already ordained priests with pastoral experience. They received specific training in preparation for the mission: learning English and Tibetan with Philippe-Édouard Foucaux, the first French Tibetologist, as well as studying medicine at Necker Hospital on the advice of missionaries who had managed to cross into Tibet via China. After several months' preparation, longer than the usual period, the three confreres were sent by the superior of the Foreign Missions, Father , and left for Portsmouth on December 23, 1849.
Missionary in Tibet
Preparing the Tibetan mission in India
Their ship set sail from Portsmouth on January 1, 1850, and they arrived in Chennai on April 26, 1850. They were welcomed by the English archbishop, Monsignor Farrell, who put them up and announced their arrival in the Catholic Bengal newspaper. The welcome was warm, but the three missionaries soon fell ill, suffering from miliaria rubra. After a few days, they left for Kolkata for Ascension Day. The English were very interested in their mission, but the English press was less interested in the missionary aspect than in the route to Tibet, which had never been explored before.
The superiors of the Paris Foreign Missions decided to appoint Julien Rabin superior of the mission. He sent them regular reports on the expedition's progress. In order to get closer to Tibet, the missionaries left Kolkata on June 14, 1850, to settle in Guwahati in the Assam region. They then realized the difficulty of the task: the multiplicity of dialects and languages would make their progress very difficult. So they decided to study them for six hours a day.
The mission's superior, Julien Rabin, wanted to make Guwahati the center of the mission, even though it was far from Tibet. He wrote to his superiors to tell them of his desire to build a college there in order to spread Catholicism in the region and make the town the center of their activities. His plans seem increasingly unrealistic. Living conditions are very basic: the missionaries are housed in an unsanitary bungalow, and Julien Rabin is frequently ill. Following his letters, the superiors of the Paris Foreign Missions call Julien Rabin to order, pointing out that the Paris Foreign Missions have neither the financial nor the human resources to found this college, and that the objective assigned is Tibet, not the Assam region.
Tensions began to arise between the missionaries: Julien Rabin decided to delegate some of his authority to Louis Bernard, and Nicolas Krick was sent on a mission to Upper Bengal at the request of the Bishop of Dhaka. Although his trip was initially scheduled to last only six weeks, Nicolas Krick spent four months among the region's small Christian communities. The only account of this period is a very favorable comment by Monsignor Carrew to the Governor General of India on learning of Nicolas Krick's death: "I knew Nicolas Krick personally. He was an extremely kind and talented man."