La Roche University President Sister Candace Introcaso died Monday afternoon.

Introcaso was named the university’s seventh president in 2004.

“We all mourn the loss of a great woman, our longtime president and our friend, Sister Candace Introcaso,” Acting President and Provost Howard Ishiyama said at the start of a 2 p.m. prayer service in the school’s Magdalen Chapel.

The prayer service had been scheduled after the university in McCandless announced earlier Monday that Introcaso’s health had “taken a serious turn.”

Ishiyama said she died shortly before the service began. She was 69.

“She is now safe in God’s arms, where she will have eternal rest,” Ishiyama wrote on the school’s Facebook page.

The Rev. Peter Horton, La Roche’s chaplain, said he learned around 9:15 a.m. Monday that she had been taken to the hospital and “there were no further measures to be taken.”

“It’s a difficult day for the community, for our university, for all of us who worked with and knew Candace, for all of us who called her sister, president, mentor and friend, because she was all of these things,” Horton said.

Introcaso was a member of the Sisters of Divine Providence, the congregation that founded La Roche University in 1963.

“We have lost a treasured member of our community,” Sister Michele Bisbey, provincial for the Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Providence, said. “Sister Candace distinguished herself through her belief in the importance of institutions founded by women religious in American higher education. She served our largest ministry with integrity, compassion and a commitment to making higher education available to all students.”

Bisbey said Introcaso’s impact will be felt by La Roche alumni “for a generation to come.”

Under her leadership, the university expanded its academic offerings, updated the school’s Wright Library and opened its renovated Baierl Athletic Complex.

She oversaw a major renovation of the Zappala College Center to meet the changing needs of the university community beginning in the summer of 2015. In January 2020, she unveiled the school’s newly renovated Palumbo Science Center after a multimillion-dollar project to update the space.

Introcaso also oversaw the school’s transition from college to university status in 2019.

“We are remembering Sister Candace for her caring nature, her efficient and direct leadership and her love of life,” Ishiyama said, adding that she was “happiest cheering for the Pittsburgh Pirates and caring for her two dogs, Jack and PJ.”

Before becoming the university’s president, she was a member of the university’s board of trustees since 2001. From 1986 to 1991, she worked as La Roche University’s director of grants, and subsequently as assistant to the vice president for student affairs.

She previously served as vice president for planning and assessment at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida. She also had served as assistant vice president for academic affairs from 1997 to 1999 at Heritage College, located on the Yakama Indian reservation in Toppenish, Washington. She received her doctorate in higher education administration from the Claremont Graduate University.

Introcaso was a board director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Passavant/St. Margaret, a member of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute of Politics Criminal Justice Taskforce and has been a member f the Presidents’ Council of the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education.

Duquesne University President Ken Gormley, who served with Introcaso on the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education, remembered her as “a true leader and friend to so many in Pittsburgh and our region who benefitted from her work and vision.”

“I have long admired Sister Candace’s steadfast and clear leadership at La Roche and the ways she dedicated herself to the principles and values of Catholic higher education,” Gormley said.

Funeral arrangements are pending, the university said in a statement.

“Candace, thank you for everything you are, everything you did, everything you taught us,” Horton said during a livestreamed prayer service from the school. “We will never forget you. We will hold you always in our hearts and in our prayers. We will strive to love deeply, to learn more, to make this community everything you envisioned it to be, because you showed us the way.”

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