Sisters of Mercy headed toward Peru in 1961. A year later, the Catholic Church changed the rules regarding nuns.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(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 the boomers, who were left to carry out his reforms.

He convened the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, whose leaders created 16 documents that redefined the role of the church in the world. They allowed Catholics to work and pray with members of other faiths, replaced the Latin Mass with church services held in local languages, and dramatically changed how religious sisters lived and worked.

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Nuns help revolutionize health care