Teresa of Avila
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50 free Teresa of Avila trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Teresa of Avila packed several lives into one: a runaway child, a chronically ill nun, a visionary whose raptures drew both crowds and suspicion, and a tireless founder who criss-crossed Spain opening convents. Her story is full of fun facts that sound invented and are not, from the odd timing of her death to the travels of her relics. This quiz covers her childhood and family, her visions and the art they inspired, the reform she led with her fellow mystics, her books on prayer, the disputes over her body, and her appearances in novels, opera, film and pop music. It suits confirmation classes, parish quiz nights, students of Spanish history and anyone curious about one of the most vivid personalities among the saints. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which phenomenon, reported by witnesses during her raptures, embarrassed Teresa of Avila when it happened at prayer?
Levitation
Levitation was reported during her raptures, sometimes in the middle of Mass. She treated it as an embarrassment and asked her fellow nuns to hold her down.
Q 02Teresa of Avila died on the very night in 1582 that Catholic lands skipped ten days by adopting which calendar?
Gregorian
Gregorian reform meant Thursday 4 October was followed directly by Friday 15 October. That is why her death is dated to either day and her feast falls on the 15th.
Q 03Which 20th-century ruler kept a relic of Teresa of Avila's hand until he died, after his troops seized it in war?
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco kept the hand after his forces took it from Republican troops in the Spanish Civil War. The relic is now kept in the Spanish town of Ronda.
Q 04Which Italian sculptor carved the marble Ecstasy of Saint Teresa as the altarpiece of the Cornaro family's chapel?
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo Bernini also designed the chapel around it, with marble members of the Cornaro family watching from theatre boxes. He was free for the job because the new pope had shunned him.
Q 05In 1970 Teresa of Avila became the first woman given which title, held by saints whose writings shaped doctrine?
Doctor of the Church
Doctor of the Church had been an all-male honour until Teresa received it. Within that company she is known as the Doctor of Prayer.
Q 06Teresa of Avila founded the Discalced Carmelites, whose name comes from a Latin word meaning to go without what?
Shoes
Shoes were set aside as a mark of the stricter life she wanted, so her followers became known as the barefoot Carmelites.
Q 07At age seven, Teresa of Avila ran away from home with her brother Rodrigo hoping to find what among the Moors?
Martyrdom
Martyrdom was the goal, an idea she took from the lives of the saints she loved to hear. An uncle spotted the pair just outside town and brought them home.
Q 08The small orange sweets sold in Avila in honour of Saint Teresa are made mainly from which ingredient?
Egg yolks
Egg yolks give yemas de Santa Teresa their name, yema being Spanish for yolk. An Avila pastry shop began selling them under her name in 1860.
Q 09Which younger Spanish friar and poet joined Teresa of Avila's reform and helped found its first house for men?
John of the Cross
John of the Cross was planning to join another order when she asked him to follow her instead. Opponents of the reform later imprisoned him, and he began one of his finest poems in his cell.
Q 10Which Dan Brown novel makes the sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa one of four Altars of Science on a trail of clues?
Angels & Demons
Angels & Demons sends Robert Langdon to the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, where the statue marks the altar of fire. The 2009 film rebuilt the church on a larger set to fit its cranes.
Q 11The marble Ecstasy of Saint Teresa stands above an altar in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in which city?
Rome
Rome is home to the statue, in a church that belongs to the Discalced Carmelites, the order Teresa founded. A relic of her right foot is kept in the same city.
Q 12Which medieval Italian mystic received the same papal title as Teresa of Avila in 1970, the first women so honoured?
Catherine of Siena
Catherine of Siena received the honour only days after Teresa. She never lived in a convent, choosing an active life of prayer and letter-writing in the world.
Q 13Which German philosopher, later murdered at Auschwitz, became a Catholic after reading Teresa of Avila's autobiography?
Edith Stein
Q 21Which book by Teresa of Avila pictures the soul as a crystal globe holding seven mansions with God at the centre?
The Interior Castle
The Interior Castle was written in 1577 as a guide for her Carmelite sisters, each mansion a stage on the way inward. Outside it, the vision showed darkness, toads and vipers.
Q 22In her autobiography, Teresa of Avila compares four stages of prayer to four ways of doing which everyday task?
Watering a garden
Watering a garden begins as hard labour, with the gardener hauling water up from a deep well. That first stage stands for meditation, the most effortful kind of prayer.
Q 23Which George Eliot novel opens with a Prelude about Teresa of Avila and likens its heroine Dorothea Brooke to her?
Edith Stein read the book during a summer holiday in 1921 and later entered a Carmelite convent herself. She took Teresa as part of her own religious name.
Q 14Teresa of Avila is called the great Teresa to tell her apart from which later nun known as the Little Flower?
Thérèse of Lisieux
Thérèse of Lisieux died of tuberculosis at 24, three centuries after her namesake. Vita Sackville-West compared the two Carmelites in a joint study, The Eagle and the Dove.
Q 15The Carmelite order that Teresa of Avila reformed takes its name from a mountain range in which present-day country?
Israel
Israel is home to Mount Carmel, which rises above the port of Haifa. The order grew from hermits who settled on the mountain in the Crusader era.
Q 16Avila, home town of Teresa, is a World Heritage Site best known for which medieval feature ringing its old centre?
Defensive walls
Defensive walls with more than 80 towers still form a complete circuit around old Avila. Tradition dates their start to 1090, over four centuries before Teresa was born.
Q 17Teresa of Avila's paternal grandfather was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly returning to which faith?
Judaism
Judaism was the family's former faith: her grandfather Juan Sánchez was a converso, a Jew who had converted under pressure. Her father, a child at the time, grew up to be one of Avila's wealthiest men.
Q 18Teresa of Avila credited her recovery from near-fatal illness to which saint, whose name she gave her first convent?
Joseph
Joseph was the patron she thanked when she recovered after a long paralysis, and San José in Avila became the first house of her reform in 1562.
Q 19Which work by Augustine of Hippo comforted Teresa of Avila because its saintly author had once been a sinner too?
Confessions
Confessions reached her in a new Spanish translation and eased her constant worry over her own faults. As a girl she had been schooled by Augustinian nuns in Avila.
Q 20In the vision of Teresa of Avila known as the transverberation, a seraph repeatedly pierced her with what weapon?
A golden lance
A golden lance tipped with fire is how she described it, leaving her burning with love of God. The scene is the one frozen in marble in the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
Middlemarch
Middlemarch casts Dorothea as a Teresa born in the wrong century, with no great cause to give her life to. Eliot's Prelude says the saint found her epic life in reforming a religious order.
Q 24Which French philosopher argued in The Second Sex that Teresa of Avila was perhaps the only woman to live for herself?
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir singled her out among the women of history as one who rose to the level of any man of her age.
Q 25A Columbia philosopher argues which French thinker borrowed his famous evil deceiver argument from Teresa of Avila?
René Descartes
René Descartes wrote his Meditations decades after Teresa, whose books on inner reflection were widely read. Christia Mercer made the case in a 2016 paper on his debt to her.
Q 26Visions of Ecstasy, a 1989 short film about Teresa of Avila, was refused a British certificate on which legal ground?
Blasphemy
Blasphemy has been the British film board's reason for refusing only this one work. The film finally got an 18 certificate in 2012, four years after the law was repealed.
Q 27Teresa of Avila was canonised in 1622 alongside which Basque ex-soldier, the author of the Spiritual Exercises?
Ignatius of Loyola
Ignatius of Loyola was one of five saints declared that day, alongside Francis Xavier, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer.
Q 28In the 1620s Teresa of Avila was proposed as co-patron of Spain beside which apostle, whose backers won the argument?
James
James, known in Spain as Santiago, kept the title after a debate that ran through the decade. Her supporters had argued that Spain needed a modern patron to face Protestantism.
Q 29Letters from Teresa of Avila to which Spanish king helped get Inquisition cases against her allies dropped in 1579?
Philip II
Philip II wanted Spain's religious orders reformed and welcomed her foundations. His support let the Discalced Carmelites start founding houses again after three years of obstruction.
Q 30Legend says Teresa of Avila once owned a wax-coated statue of the Child Jesus now venerated in which European capital?
Prague
Prague's Carmelite friars were given the statue by a princess in 1628, long after a Spanish bride had carried it to Bohemia. A family legend says Teresa gave it to the bride's mother.