48 Fun Facts About Mother Teresa

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

Skopje, then Ottoman Üsküp and now the capital of North Macedonia, was her home until she left at 18 to become a missionary nun.

Which US president, handing Mother Teresa the Medal of Freedom, joked she might melt it down for the poor?

Ronald Reagan made the joke at the White House; she had skipped the main ceremony a month earlier because, he said, she was busy with her everyday work.

Which saint's name was the future Mother Teresa given at baptism, before she took her religious name?

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu felt a call to religious life at 12 and left home at 18, taking the name Teresa only when she became a nun.

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

The Sisters of Loreto taught in English at their schools in India, so her first stop was their abbey near Dublin; she sailed for Calcutta within months.

Mother Teresa took her religious name from Saint Thérèse, a young Carmelite nun from which French town?

Lisieux's Thérèse, not the older Teresa of Ávila, was her model; the Church had named Thérèse patron of the missions in 1927, a year before the future Mother Teresa left home to become a missionary.

Which prize named Mother Teresa its first-ever winner in 1973, six years before her Nobel?

The Templeton Prize was created by investor John Templeton, who set its purse above the Nobel's because he felt the Nobels ignored spirituality; she was its first winner.

What post did Mother Teresa take up in 1944 at St Mary's, the Calcutta convent school where she taught?

Headmistress was as high as she rose at St Mary's: the poverty she glimpsed beyond the convent walls led her to ask permission to leave the school in 1948.

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

On a train to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, she felt called to leave the convent and live among the poor, but had to wait until 1948 for permission to go.

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

A white sari with blue borders, the cheap everyday dress of Indian women, replaced her nun's habit in 1948 when she left the convent for the slums.

Who first joined Mother Teresa's work in the Calcutta slums?

Her former students from St Mary's came one by one, and with them she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which the Vatican recognised in October 1950.

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

Holy Family Hospital, Patna, gave her a short nursing course with the Medical Mission Sisters; that December she walked into the Calcutta slums for the first time.

Mother Teresa's first hospice, opened in Calcutta in 1952, was called Nirmal Hriday, meaning what?

Home of the Pure Heart took in people found dying on Calcutta's streets so they could spend their last days in peace; the city gave her a disused pilgrim hostel beside the Kali temple to house it.

What name, meaning 'City of Peace', did Mother Teresa give her settlement for people with leprosy?

Shanti Nagar gave leprosy patients a settled home of their own; her nuns had begun with a mobile clinic, carrying medicine to patients the city's overburdened hospitals could not treat.

Which group did Mother Teresa's Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, opened in Calcutta in 1955, take in?

Orphans and homeless children were taken in off the streets, among them abandoned disabled and tubercular youngsters; it was the young order's second home after its hospice for the dying.

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

Venezuela got the first foreign house in 1965, months after the Vatican made the order answerable only to the pope; houses in Europe and Africa soon followed.

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

The South Bronx, New York, got her first American house in 1971; she drew no line between rich and poor countries, telling her Nobel audience that people lay hungry in the streets of New York too.

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

Free service to the poorest of the poor is the promise that sets the order apart, and the Nobel committee quoted it in 1979 when explaining why it had chosen her.

In 1982, which besieged city's front line did Mother Teresa cross to rescue children stranded in a hospital?

Beirut was split between a Christian east and a Muslim west; during a ceasefire she crossed the line with Red Cross workers and brought the children out.

Mother Teresa's Nobel audience recited a prayer credited to whom?

Francis of Assisi's name is attached to the prayer beginning 'Lord, make me a channel of your peace'; she had copies handed round the hall in Oslo and asked everyone to say it with her.

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

Give it to the poor in India was her request when she turned the dinner down; she took the prize itself 'in the name of the poor', telling the committee she was personally unworthy of it.

In her 1979 Nobel lecture, where did Mother Teresa tell her audience that love begins?

At home: 'Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action.' The snappier 'go home and love your family' often credited to her is a later paraphrase.

Which Indian honour did Mother Teresa receive in 1980, the year after her Nobel?

Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, went to a Balkan-born nun who had long since taken Indian citizenship.

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

Something Beautiful for God made a little-known nun world famous, and it changed its maker too: Muggeridge wrote a book of the same name and in 1982 became a Catholic, crediting her influence.

How did the cameraman explain the bright hospice footage Malcolm Muggeridge called Mother Teresa's miracle?

A new type of ultra-sensitive Kodak film was the cameraman's explanation, given on camera years later for a documentary critical of her; Muggeridge had credited her 'divine light'.

Which gift from Pope Paul VI did Mother Teresa raffle in 1964 to pay for her leprosy colony?

His ceremonial limousine was a gift from his 1964 visit to India; she raffled it at once for her leprosy patients, and in 1971 the same pope gave her the first John XXIII Peace Prize.

Mother Teresa said she was Albanian by blood and Indian by citizenship, and that by calling she belonged to what?

The world was her answer, and she added that her heart belonged entirely to Jesus; the order she began in one Calcutta slum reached more than a hundred countries in her lifetime.

Which writer, one of Mother Teresa's fiercest critics, called her 'a friend of poverty'?

Christopher Hitchens argued that she glorified poverty instead of fighting it, and he used the line in a column mocking her first recognised miracle the day after she was beatified.

What was the provocative title of the 1994 British television documentary attacking Mother Teresa's record?

Hell's Angel was a title its own presenter fretted about: his backers chose it over his working title, Sacred Cow, and he predicted it would be called hurtful and offensive.

For which American financier, tried for fraud, did Mother Teresa write to the judge asking for clemency?

Charles Keating had given her charity more than a million dollars before his savings-and-loan empire collapsed; the judge still handed him the maximum ten-year sentence.

Mother Teresa's private letters revealed that she felt abandoned by God for roughly how long?

Fifty years, near enough: the 'darkness', as she called it, set in around the time she began her slum work and lasted until her death, yet she stayed outwardly cheerful throughout.

Which communist ruler of Albania refused to let Mother Teresa visit her mother and sister there?

Enver Hoxha, who declared Albania an atheist state, kept the country closed to her; her mother and sister both died in Tirana without seeing her again.

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

He was poisoned, many believe, by political enemies: a vocal campaigner for Albanian independence, he fell ill and died within hours of a political meeting, and the cause was never established.

Which Northern Irish city did Mother Teresa move to with her nuns in 1971, at the height of the Troubles?

Belfast's Ballymurphy estate, where soldiers had shot civilians dead two months earlier, became her nuns' home; they left abruptly in 1973, and a local priest blamed a cold welcome from church leaders, which the Church denied.

What did her nuns do when Mother Teresa offered to resign in 1990?

Voted for her to stay in a secret ballot, though she had asked to retire after a near-fatal heart attack the year before. She finally handed over the order in March 1997, six months before she died.

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

With a state funeral, India honoured a Balkan-born nun as one of its own: the president called her particularly Indian in spirit, and the prime minister an apostle of peace and love.

The first miracle credited to Mother Teresa, accepted by the Vatican in 2002, was the healing of an Indian woman's what?

A tumour in her abdomen vanished, Monica Besra said, after prayers to Mother Teresa a year after the nun's death; her husband and her doctors publicly credited her prescription medicine instead.

What did John Paul II waive for Mother Teresa's sainthood?

The five-year wait after a candidate's death was set aside within two years of hers, and she was beatified in 2003; full sainthood still had to wait for a second miracle.

Mother Teresa's second miracle, recognised in 2015, healed a man from which country, home to the world's most Catholics?

Brazil was home to the man whose sudden recovery from a grave brain illness, after his family prayed to her, the Vatican accepted in December 2015; that second miracle cleared the way for her to be declared a saint.

Which pope declared Mother Teresa a saint?

Francis canonised her on 4 September 2016 before tens of thousands in St Peter's Square, and some 1,500 homeless people from across Italy were brought to Rome by bus to join them.

In 2017 Mother Teresa was named co-patron of Calcutta's archdiocese alongside which Jesuit missionary to Asia?

Francis Xavier, the Jesuit who carried Catholicism to India and Japan in the 1500s, was already the archdiocese's patron; its archbishop added her a year after she was made a saint.

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 star of a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film played Mother Teresa in 2025's Mother?

Noomi Rapace plays her over seven days in 1948, waiting for permission to leave her convent and found her own order; the actress promised a 'punk rock' portrait and said of her character, 'She was no saint.'

In 2015 a Hindu nationalist leader claimed Mother Teresa's real aim in serving the poor was what?

Making them Christians, said RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, was her aim, and politicians across parties objected; Delhi's chief minister, who had once worked at her Calcutta hospice, tweeted: 'She was a noble soul. Pl spare her.'

What does Gonxhe, the Albanian name Mother Teresa was known by as a child, mean?

Flower bud is the dictionary meaning; her biographer Anne Sebba says it began as a family nickname for a 'plump, round and tidy' little girl, and it is the name Albanians still know her by.

Which award, often called Asia's Nobel Prize, did Mother Teresa receive in 1962?

Ramon Magsaysay Prize trustees praised her 'merciful cognizance of the abject poor of a foreign land'; the Nobel committee took another seventeen years to catch up.

Which rare honour, first given to Winston Churchill, did the US Congress vote Mother Teresa in 1996?

Honorary US citizenship had been conferred on only three occasions in over two hundred years, the law noted; signing it, the president said that by her values she was 'already an American citizen'.

Where was Mother Teresa buried after her death in 1997?

At her order's headquarters in Calcutta, known as the Mother House, the building where she died; her tomb there quickly became a place of pilgrimage for people of all faiths, rich and poor alike.

The Missionaries of Charity began in 1950 with twelve members; roughly how many sisters were there when Mother Teresa died?

4,000, give or take a few hundred, working in more than ninety countries alongside many thousands of lay volunteers; her 'little Society' had grown more than three-hundredfold in her lifetime.