Mother Teresa’s real name wasn’t Teresa.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a Loreto nun in India
Credit: © ARCHIVIO GBB/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
September 23, 2026

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Though the world knew her as Mother Teresa, the nun who would become a saint was known to her family of devout Albanian Catholics as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Born in 1910 in Skopje, then a part of the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia, she moved to Ireland at the age of 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto. Upon taking her vows in India, where she relocated in 1929, she took the name Teresa in honor of Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. Because a fellow nun had already done the same, Teresa opted for the Spanish spelling of the name. 

Mother Teresa is best known for founding the Missionaries of Charity, whose members devote themselves to serving the poor from all walks of life. Though founded in Calcutta in 1950, the congregation has since expanded to 139 countries around the world. Teresa suffered a decades-long crisis of faith, as do many spiritual leaders, but persisted in her charitable works. She died in 1997 at the age of 87 and was officially canonized as St. Teresa of Calcutta by Pope Francis in 2016.

By the Numbers

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Mother Teresa’s father may have been poisoned by political adversaries.

The future Mother Teresa was just 8 years old when her father, Nikola Bojaxhiu, fell ill and died. Though never proved, it’s been widely speculated that he was poisoned by political adversaries who took issue with his campaigns for Albanian rights and his opposition to the formation of Yugoslavia. Gëzim Alpion, a professor at the University of Binghamton, told The Telegraph that Nikola was “killed because he was an Albanian patriot,” and suggested that “her father’s poisoning by Slavic nationalists in 1919 marked the beginning of Mother Teresa’s attempts to replace him with a divine father — Jesus — and the start of her lifelong doubts about the existence of God.” Teresa didn’t discuss her personal life, but her family strongly believed that Nikola had been poisoned.

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