Andre’ Delbecq, a Toledo native who was a business management professor and former dean of business and administration at the Santa Clara University in California, died Oct. 12 in Stanford University Medical Center. He was 80.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer diagnosed about eight days before he died, said his wife, Mili Delbecq.

“He had surgery on Monday before he passed away. He never recovered from the surgery, which was a surprise to the surgeon and everyone else,” she said.

Mr. Delbecq graduated from Central Catholic High School in 1954 and received a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Toledo four years later. He returned to UT in 1963 to teach business classes for three years after obtaining masters and doctoral degrees in business administration from Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.

His classmates from Central Catholic, which included the Rev. James Bacik, said Mr. Delbecq often returned to Toledo, sometimes several times a year, to visit friends. They said he was proud of his Midwestern roots and held a fondness for the city despite living nearly 3,000 miles away.

“He always retained a love for the city of Toledo, the University of Toledo, and Central Catholic. He was an example of someone who moved away and didn’t forget his roots and remained appreciative of what he got here,” said Father Bacik, a close friend for more than 60 years.

While as an assistant professor in business at UT, Mr. Delbecq won first place in the annual academic competition sponsored by the Academy of Management for his research in the study of behavior of individuals in decision-making. His research was sponsored through fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Herman B. Wells Leadership Seminar at Indiana University.

He left Toledo in 1967 to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became chairman of the graduate business school’s management department.

He was named dean of the Leavey School of Business in 1979 at Santa Clara, a Jesuit community college in Santa Clara, Calif. He stepped down in 1989 as dean and returned to the classroom to teach, focusing on spirituality and business leadership, which garnered him national and international recognition.

Mrs. Delbecq said her husband conceived the idea for the program for classes to connect business with ethics and religion after business leaders asked for it. Executives in the computer, telecommunications, and bioscience industries and others with advanced degrees were finding it difficult to reconcile their business lives with ethics and spirituality, she said.

“They seemed to feel the need for that and he tried to get the Jesuits to develop such a class. Finally, the president of Santa Clara told him that if you think it is needed so much than why don’t you start it,” she said.

From that proposal emerged the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education. He was that center’s senior fellow when he died.

“He worked at the university the day before he went into the hospital. He was still active at Santa Clara as a professor and heading up some other departments in the university,” his wife said.

The retired pastor of Corpus Christi University Parish and now a visiting scholar at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Father Bacik said Mr. Delbecq’s spirituality was nurtured at Central Catholic and further developed after he arrived at Santa Clara.

“Very early he was more into spirituality than most people, and then he developed into it being in the Jesuit environment,” he said.

At Father Bacik’s request, Mr. Delbecq held a seminar on spirituality for business leaders at Corpus Christi University Parish in 2000.

Father Bacik said Mr. Delbecq’s work centered on imaginative spirituality on the life of Jesus Christ and putting one’s self deeply into Gospel scenes.

“He would get them together and lead them through discernment and that process helped many organizational leaders find themselves to a deeper spirituality,” he said.

Born Sept. 30, 1936, he attended Blessed Sacrament School. He married the former Mili Mosher on April 15, 1989.

He served on the board of trustees of Ascension Health, Inc., a faith-based health care organization which operates hospitals in the Detroit area.

Surviving are his wife, Mili; daughter, Adrienne Delbecq-Backos; brother, Jean Pierre Delbecq, and three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a son, Jean-Marc Delbecq.

A funeral Mass in his memory will begin at 11 a.m. Nov. 4 at Blessed Sacrament Church in West Toledo.

Contact Mark Reiter at: markreiter@theblade.com or 419-724-6199.

First Published October 25, 2016, 4:00 a.m.