50 Fun Facts About Mother Teresa

In which city, then part of the Ottoman Empire, was Mother Teresa born in 1910?

The city is now the capital of North Macedonia, and it opened a Memorial House in her honour in 2009.

What was Mother Teresa's ethnic background?

She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu; Gonxhe means "flower bud" in Albanian.

What was Mother Teresa's given name at birth?

Anjezë is a cognate of Agnes; she considered 27 August, the day of her baptism, her "true birthday".

Which religious order did the 18-year-old Anjezë travel to Ireland to join in 1928?

She went to Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham to learn English, the language of instruction at the order's schools in India, and never saw her mother again.

Mother Teresa chose her religious name in honour of which saint?

Because another nun already had that name, she took the Spanish spelling, Teresa.

Where in India did she begin her novitiate in 1929 and learn Bengali?

She taught at St. Teresa's School near the convent in the lower Himalayas and took her first vows in May 1931.

What position did she hold at the Loreto convent school in Entally, Calcutta, from 1944?

She taught there for nearly twenty years, increasingly disturbed by the poverty outside and the Bengal famine of 1943.

Where was Mother Teresa when she experienced the "call within the call" on 10 September 1946?

She said the message was clear: leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.

What did Mother Teresa adopt as the habit of the Missionaries of Charity?

Novices wear white saris without the three blue stripes until they take their vows.

In what year did the Vatican approve what became the Missionaries of Charity?

It was to care for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers" and all who felt unwanted.

Where did Mother Teresa receive basic medical training before venturing into the Calcutta slums?

She also took Indian citizenship and started a school in Motijhil before turning to the sick and hungry.

Her first hospice, opened in 1952 in a former Hindu temple, was called Nirmal Hriday, meaning what?

Muslims there were read the Quran, Hindus received Ganges water and Catholics received the last rites.

What was the name of the leprosy hospice she opened, meaning "City of Peace"?

The order also ran mobile leprosy clinics across Calcutta handing out medication, dressings and food.

Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, opened in 1955, served which group?

The name means Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart.

In which country did the Missionaries of Charity open their first house outside India, in 1965?

Rome, Tanzania and Austria followed in 1968, and the first US house opened in the South Bronx.

Where was the first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States established?

By 1984 the order ran 19 establishments across the country.

Besides poverty, chastity and obedience, what fourth vow do Missionaries of Charity take?

By 2012 the congregation had more than 4,500 nuns working in over 133 countries.

How many languages was Mother Teresa reported to speak fluently?

Bengali, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, English and Hindi.

How many children did Mother Teresa rescue from a front-line hospital in the 1982 Siege of Beirut?

She crossed the war zone with Red Cross workers to evacuate the young patients.

In which year did Mother Teresa receive the Nobel Peace Prize?

The citation praised her work overcoming poverty and distress "which also constitutes a threat to peace".

What did Mother Teresa ask to be done with the money for the traditional Nobel banquet?

The banquet would have cost $192,000; asked how to promote world peace, she replied, "Go home and love your family."

Asked at the Nobel ceremony what people could do for world peace, what did Mother Teresa reply?

In her lecture she said the poverty of the West, of feeling unwanted and unloved, was harder to remove than hunger.

Which Indian honour, the country's highest civilian award, did she receive in 1980?

She had received the Padma Shri in 1962 and was issued an Indian diplomatic passport under the name Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu.

Which 1969 BBC documentary by Malcolm Muggeridge made Mother Teresa an international celebrity?

Muggeridge claimed dim footage from the Home for the Dying came out lit by "divine light"; the crew credited a new ultra-sensitive Kodak film.

How did the crew explain the surprisingly well-lit footage that Muggeridge called a miracle?

Muggeridge, an agnostic turned believer, later converted to Catholicism.

Which pope gave Mother Teresa the inaugural Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971?

She also received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1962, the Balzan Prize in 1978 and Britain's Order of Merit in 1983.

How much money did Mother Teresa reportedly have on arriving in India, marked on a 2010 coin?

India issued the special ₹5 coin on the centenary of her birth in August 2010.

Which English journalist was Mother Teresa's most outspoken critic, calling her "a friend of poverty"?

His 1994 documentary Hell's Angel preceded his book The Missionary Position, and he later testified to the Vatican tribunal.

What was the title of Hitchens's 1994 documentary about Mother Teresa?

It argued that she urged the poor to accept their fate while portraying the rich as favoured by God.

Which convicted American financier's trial judge did Mother Teresa write to asking for clemency?

She was also criticised for accepting honours from Haiti's Duvalier regime and for her links with Robert Maxwell.

For roughly how long did Mother Teresa privately doubt God's existence, per her letters?

She asked that the letters be destroyed; they were published instead as Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.

Which communist ruler of her homeland barred Mother Teresa from visiting her family?

Her mother and sister both died under the regime, and she could only visit Albania in 1991 after communism collapsed.

What is believed to have happened to Mother Teresa's father, Nikollë, in 1919?

The death, attributed to Serbian agents after a political meeting in Belgrade, came when she was eight.

Which Northern Irish city did she visit with four sisters in 1971, before leaving abruptly in 1973?

Senior clergy reportedly felt the "missionary traffic should be in the other direction".

When Mother Teresa offered to resign as head of her order in 1990, what did the sisters do?

She finally stepped down in March 1997, and Sister Nirmala Joshi was elected six months before her death.

Who succeeded Mother Teresa as Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity in 1997?

Sister Mary Prema Pierick later held the post, and Sister Mary Joseph was elected in 2022.

How was Mother Teresa's death on 5 September 1997 marked by the Indian government?

She lay in an open casket at St Thomas, Calcutta, for a week, and Cardinal Angelo Sodano gave the homily for the Pope.

The Vatican recognised an Indian woman's tumour healing as her first miracle. What was applied to the woman?

Monica Besra's husband and doctors said conventional medicine cured her; he called the miracle a hoax.

In what year was Mother Teresa beatified, becoming "Blessed"?

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints had issued its nihil obstat in April 1999 after examining her critics' allegations.

The second miracle attributed to her, recognised in 2015, involved a man from which country?

He was healed of multiple brain tumours in 2008; the case surfaced during World Youth Day 2013.

Which pope canonised Mother Teresa on 4 September 2016?

Some 1,500 homeless people from across Italy were among the crowd in St Peter's Square.

Alongside which saint was Mother Teresa named co-patron of the Archdiocese of Calcutta in 2017?

Her feast day is 5 September, the anniversary of her death.

The United Nations designated 5 September, the anniversary of her death, as what?

The same date is a public holiday in Albania, and Tirana's international airport is named after her.

Which actress played Mother Teresa in the 2025 film Mother?

Chaplin, Hussey and Stevenson had each played her in earlier productions between 1997 and 2014.

Which Hindu nationalist leader said in 2015 that her aim was to convert those she served?

The RSS chief's remark drew protests from politicians across parties, including Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.

What does Gonxhe, Mother Teresa's Albanian middle name, mean?

Anjezë is a cognate of Agnes; she was born into a Kosovar Albanian family and baptised in Skopje the day after her birth.

Which 1962 Asian honour did Mother Teresa receive for her work among Calcutta's poor?

The same year India gave her the Padma Shri; the Jawaharlal Nehru Award followed in 1969 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980.

Where was Mother Teresa when she suffered her first heart attack in 1983?

She was visiting Pope John Paul II; after a second attack in 1989 she was fitted with a pacemaker.

In which year did Mother Teresa return to Albania for the first time, opening a home in Tirana?

Communist Albania had long rejected her order; she also took aid to Ethiopia, Chernobyl and earthquake-hit Armenia.

At the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity ran about how many missions worldwide?

More than 4,000 sisters and a brotherhood of 300 worked in 123 countries, running hospices, soup kitchens and orphanages.