Today is the feast of St. John Chrysostom. (For Roman Catholics. The Orthodox celebrate his feast on November 13)

Mike Aquilina gets us started, and here is the article from the OrthodoxWIki site – a wikipedia site by and for the Eastern Orthodox.

John Chrysostom, born in Antioch, gained a reputation as an excellent preacher there. In 397, he became Archbishop of Constantinople, and got to work:

As Metropolitan of Constantinople, John immediately set about a much needed reform of the court, clergy and laity. He reduced the customary spending of his own household in favour of the poor and hospitals. He enacted severe discipline for the clergy and attacked the behaviour, the clothes, and the make-up of the women at court. He also criticised those Christians who had been to the races on Good Friday and to the games in the stadium on Holy Saturday.

In 401 AD, at a synod in Ephesius, he deposed six bishops, with the result that all forces opposed to him, at home and abroad, consolidated in a united effort to destroy him. The Empress Eudoxia regarded his drive for moral reform as a personal attack on herself. Meanwhile Theophilus made common cause with the empress and organised a cabal of 36 bishops, which assembled at Chalcedon in 403, as the Synod of the Oak. The synod condemned St. John unheard. He was charged on a series of more or less false charges, was also accused of treason for calling Eudoxia ‘Jezebel’, was dropped from his see, and asked for his banishment. Arcadius exiled John to Bithynia, but an earthquake in Constantinople terrified him and he recalled John the next day. John resumed his plain speaking, which again enraged Eudoxia; Theophilus intrigued against him with appeals to an Arian council of Antioch, and John was again banished, this time for resuming the duties of a see from which he had been ‘lawfully deposed’. This took place on June 9, 404 AD; although his own people and many bishops supported him, he was exiled, first to Curusus in Armenia, where he remained three years, and then to Pontus, where he was killed by enforced travel in bad weather, on foot and in spite of repeated pleas of exhaustion. He died on September 14, 407 AD. Thirty-one years later his body was taken back to Constantinople and reburied in the church of the Apostles.

Here’s a site dedicated to St. John Chrysostom, which includes a helpful article on the question that always comes up in modern times – a discussion of his controversial and perhaps misunderstood "Orations Against the Judaizers",