(CNN) -- The baby boomer generation's efforts at creating social
justice dramatically transformed history -- from the Vietnam War
to gay rights. Even institutions that kept tradition at their
very core -- institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church --
were radically changed by this generation. Within the church,
perhaps the biggest agents of this change were its nuns. A wave
of new thought during the 1960s opened cloister doors. While
modernization of the church did leave fewer nuns in the pipeline
to carry out work in the health care and education fields, the
ones who stayed -- this baby boomer generation of religious
sisters -- undertook a kind of grass-roots, social justice-
oriented health care. Even today, their work continues to fill
in the gaps left by our general health care system. Vatican II
revolutionizes religious life It was Pope John XXIII who
initiated the Roman Catholic Church's modernization movement in
1962. The pope was decidedly not a baby boomer -- he was born in
1881. But he inspired t