THIS IS EASTER, a time to celebrate the Resurrection, and in an old-world setting in Needham, Mass., skilled artisans are working to resurrect revered pieces of the past for Manchester’s Catholic Medical Center.

Those pieces were discovered last summer.

As hospital officials prepared to demolish an obsolete incinerator building to make way for more parking, Darlene Stromstad thought it best that someone check one last time to make certain there was nothing of value inside the brick structure.

“I had never been inside the building,” said Darlene, who is CMC’s vice president for corporate development, “but I knew that some of my departments had been using it for storage.

“I asked one of our administrative assistants to go over and make sure it was empty,” she added, “so Karyl Berg went over with Steve Gray from the building and grounds department. Then Karyl called and said, ‘You won’t believe what’s in here.’”

They found eight grimy wooden crates.

The crates contained stained glass windows.

The windows are tied to the genesis of CMC.

There are 16 panels in all. Ten were in the chapel at the former Sacred Heart Hospital on Hanover Street. The remaining panels were from Notre Dame Hospital — once situated on the city’s West Side — which was merged with Sacred Heart in 1974 to create CMC. Officials presume the glass panels have been in storage ever since.

The value of the panels?

No one knew, so architect Roger Dignard, who is overseeing CMC’s on-going $19 million expansion project, suggested that hospital officials contact stained glass expert Richard Millard from Antrim.

“Honestly,” Darlene said, “we didn’t know if we had something from Sears & Roebuck or Tiffany’s, but Mr. Millard knew they were special right away.”

Soon, they were on their way to Needham, Mass.

“I would say these are from 1880 to 1890,” said Roberto Rosa. “They’re from the Tyrolean Artists’ Guild in Austria. Just looking at one of the windows, when you see the painting style, the color and the firing . . . I had guessed Tyrolean right away. Still, it’s always nice to open the crates and see you were right.”

Roberto was in his workshop at Serpentino Stained Glass.

He held a corner section of stained glass up to the light.

“Some of the windows have their original signature. See the letters ‘TAG’ all intertwined?” he asked. “But one of the ways to recognize their work is this color. It’s called ‘violet of iron,’ and that’s what gives it this reddish tone.”

The tone is subdued in Roberto’s shop.

These are serious craftsmen engaged in a serious business and the century-old series of windows from Manchester commands their full attention.

“On some pieces, where a piece of glass has a crack or two, we can repair it with a conservation grade epoxy (called Hxtal),” Roberto said. “It’s important for us to keep as much of the original window as possible, but on some panels where glass was shattered, we have to replace it and replicate the color as closely as we can.

“It’s a traditional style that dates back to the 1300s,” he added. “The techniques haven’t changed that much since then, which is nice, but we’ll probably put in a good four or five months on them.”

The artisans in Roberto’s shop know a lot about stained glass, and they also know about the primitive social circumstances attached to their ancient art form.

Glass craftsman Matthew Fallon reflected on that fact as he deftly painted a flower on a palm-sized piece of glass using a paint blended with glass powder, metal oxide and trace amounts of mercury, arsenic and cadmium.

“One reason I like this work is the connection to pre-industrial techniques, but these,” he said, with a nod toward the delicate flowers on an original panel, “these were probably painted by little Austrian kids who started at 12 or 13 years old. They were probably beaten the first three years, but in later years — because they were immersed at an early age in the old apprentice program — they did this exquisite work.”

Matthew does, too.

So does Tom Driscoll.

Tom was working with long strips of grooved lead. He was reassembling a restored CMC panel called “Christ Giving Blessing to St. Theresa.” There was a jigsaw puzzle feel to his task, except each piece of glass — none bigger than your open hand — had to be bordered in lead and ultimately soldered in place.

“This is such an honor,” he said, as he shaped and molded the lead with his fingers. “They’re such remarkable windows. If you look at one of them piece by piece, it’s incredible work and then, when you view it as a whole, it’s magnificent.”

The daily passion play at Serpentino Stained Glass was not lost on Darlene Stromstad. From the time of her first phone call, she was convinced that CMC’s stained glass windows were going to be in loving, caring hands.

“When you work with the glass,” said Roberto, who was born in America and reared in Italy, “there are times when you see the face of Jesus so beautifully rendered . . . it moves you in ways that are hard to describe.

“Then, when you realize you are working on a piece that was in the hands of these great artists, artists who held this glass and shaped it and painted it and fired it . . . at the end of the day, there is a lot of satisfaction.”

The same can be said at CMC.

That’s where Sister Andrea McDonald currently serves as director of pastoral care, but in 1957 she was a nursing student at Sacred Heart Hospital.

“At that time, some of these windows were in the chapel,” she said. “The unique thing about them is that they opened and turned outward, so in the afternoon, the setting sun would hit them.

“They depicted really specific events in the life of Christ,” she added.

“One showed Jesus talking to little children and one was the raising of Lazarus and they were so inspirational; seeing Jesus with the little children because certainly we had the little babies at Sacred Heart, and the Resurrection was just as special because, when a patient died, we knew there was something beyond for them.

“I’m not sure if I can say it was because of the inspiration from the windows,” Sister Andrea added, “but five days after I was graduated from nurses’ training in 1960, I entered the Sisters of Mercy.”

Given the nature of the work, hospital administrators didn’t want to impose a deadline for completion of the stained glass restoration, but they do have hopes.

This summer, CMC will end a successful $2.5 million capital campaign. That will likely coincide with the dedication of the new $19 million, four-story addition and the story will only get better if the windows are in place for a planned celebration.

“It’s a gift really, that we discovered these windows when we did,” Darlene said. “We think of it as a sign of our own resurrection because as recently as five years ago, some people didn’t think Catholic Medical Center would be around.

“I don’t know if, during the Optima era, anyone appreciated the emotional value of these panels,” she added. “Now, these pieces from our founders — this part of our history — will be a part of our future.”