Mother Teresa Trivia
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48 free Mother Teresa trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Mother Teresa was one of the most famous people of the twentieth century, and this quiz covers her whole story: the Albanian girl born in Ottoman Skopje, the Loreto teacher in Calcutta, the "call within the call" on a train to Darjeeling, the white sari with blue borders, the Nobel Peace Prize, the decades of secret spiritual darkness and the 2016 canonisation. Easy questions ask which city she worked in and what her order is called; harder ones dig into the saint she named herself after, the banquet she cancelled in Oslo, the ceasefire she brokered in Beirut, her fiercest critic and the miracle disputed by the patient's own husband. The questions cover the honours and the controversies alike, so the round is fair to admirers and sceptics. It suits religion and history quizzes, school projects and anyone curious about a life that still divides opinion. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Mother Teresa, the Missionaries of Charity and the people and books connected with her, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city, then part of the Ottoman Empire, was Mother Teresa born in 1910?
Skopje
Skopje, then Ottoman Üsküp and now the capital of North Macedonia, was her home until she left at 18 to become a missionary nun.
Q 02Which US president, handing Mother Teresa the Medal of Freedom, joked she might melt it down for the poor?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 03Which saint's name was the future Mother Teresa given at baptism, before she took her religious name?
Agnes
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.
Q 04Which religious order did the 18-year-old future Mother Teresa travel to Ireland to join in 1928?
The Sisters of Loreto
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.
Q 05Mother Teresa took her religious name from Saint Thérèse, a young Carmelite nun from which French town?
Lisieux
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.
Q 06Which prize named Mother Teresa its first-ever winner in 1973, six years before her Nobel?
Templeton Prize
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.
Q 07What post did Mother Teresa take up in 1944 at St Mary's, the Calcutta convent school where she taught?
Headmistress
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.
Q 08Where was Mother Teresa when she experienced the "call within the call" on 10 September 1946?
On a train to Darjeeling
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.
Q 09What did Mother Teresa adopt as the habit of the Missionaries of Charity?
A white sari with blue borders
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.
Q 10Who first joined Mother Teresa's work in the Calcutta slums?
Her former students
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.
Q 11Where did Mother Teresa receive basic medical training before venturing into the Calcutta slums?
Holy Family Hospital, Patna
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.
Q 12Mother Teresa's first hospice, opened in Calcutta in 1952, was called Nirmal Hriday, meaning what?
Home of the Pure Heart
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.
Q 13What name, meaning 'City of Peace', did Mother Teresa give her settlement for people with leprosy?
Q 21In her 1979 Nobel lecture, where did Mother Teresa tell her audience that love begins?
At home
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.
Q 22Which Indian honour did Mother Teresa receive in 1980, the year after her Nobel?
Bharat Ratna
Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, went to a Balkan-born nun who had long since taken Indian citizenship.
Q 23Which 1969 BBC documentary by Malcolm Muggeridge made Mother Teresa an international celebrity?
Something Beautiful for God
Shanti Nagar
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.
Q 14Which group did Mother Teresa's Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, opened in Calcutta in 1955, take in?
Orphans and homeless children
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.
Q 15In which country did the Missionaries of Charity open their first house outside India, in 1965?
Venezuela
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.
Q 16Where was the first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States established?
The South Bronx, New York
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.
Q 17Besides poverty, chastity and obedience, what fourth vow do Missionaries of Charity take?
Free service to the poorest of the poor
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.
Q 18In 1982, which besieged city's front line did Mother Teresa cross to rescue children stranded in a hospital?
Beirut
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.
Q 19Mother Teresa's Nobel audience recited a prayer credited to whom?
Francis of Assisi
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.
Q 20What did Mother Teresa ask to be done with the money for the Nobel banquet?
Give it to the poor in India
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.
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.
Q 24How did the cameraman explain the bright hospice footage Malcolm Muggeridge called Mother Teresa's miracle?
A new type of ultra-sensitive Kodak film
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'.
Q 25Which gift from Pope Paul VI did Mother Teresa raffle in 1964 to pay for her leprosy colony?
His ceremonial limousine
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.
Q 26Mother Teresa said she was Albanian by blood and Indian by citizenship, and that by calling she belonged to what?
The world
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.
Q 27Which writer, one of Mother Teresa's fiercest critics, called her 'a friend of poverty'?
Christopher Hitchens
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.
Q 28What was the provocative title of the 1994 British television documentary attacking Mother Teresa's record?
Hell's Angel
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.
Q 29For which American financier, tried for fraud, did Mother Teresa write to the judge asking for clemency?
Charles Keating
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.
Q 30Mother Teresa's private letters revealed that she felt abandoned by God for roughly how long?
Fifty years
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.