NEW YORK (CBS 2) – A Brooklyn church launched a campaign to have its founding pastor declared a saint.

Monsignor Bernard Quinn began Saint Peter Claver Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant back in 1922 as the first church for Black Catholics in the Brooklyn Diocese.

He was an early proponent of civil rights and openly took on the Ku Klux Klan decades before the 1960s.

Church officials said the Diocese begun the process but that it could be 10 years before the Vatican would formally consider sainthood for Monsignor Quinn.