Fran Walsh's face could light a parade route. Now, if the sun hits his image just right, it will brighten a church.

Mr. Walsh played St. Patrick in the annual Downtown parade for about 20 years, wearing homemade vestments and carrying a crosier crafted from an antique coat tree. With a big bearded grin under his tall green miter, he'd work both sides of Fifth Avenue, shaking hands.

Even near death with melanoma, the retired city school teacher marched last year, his cousins from Chicago, nieces, nephews and grandchildren trailing behind. When he got home to Brookline that day, he lay on the floor with his legs upon the couch, just as he had after so many Pittsburgh Marathons and Great Races he had run, and told his wife, Lois, "I don't feel any worse than if I had just finished the Great Race.''

Mr. Walsh died less than two months later at 75.

His buddies in the Allegheny County Ancient Order of Hibernians came up with a fitting tribute for his zeal. When they commissioned Nick Parrendo, the stained-glass artist, to create windows for Old St. Patrick Church in the Strip District, they had Mr. Parrendo make the fifth-century saint look like the Fifth Avenue fixture, Mr. Walsh himself.

A Mass to bless the windows of St. Patrick and St. Brigid will be celebrated by Bishop Paul Bradley in the little Liberty Avenue church tomorrow at noon.

The parish goes back to 1808, and this church is actually the fourth St. Patrick's, dedicated March 17, 1936, the same day as the big flood, though the waters never reached the church. Maybe they were awed by the pastor, the Rev. James Cox, famous for organizing soup kitchens, distributing coal and leading 25,000 jobless men from the Strip District to the front of the White House.

Unsurprisingly, a church with such humble roots never had stained glass windows. Stephen Wayhart, one of the leaders of the Old St. Patrick's renovation committee and the Hibernians' $25,000 fund-raising effort, said the big windows in back had been "frosted glass like in your bathroom, like a really bad bathroom.''

No more. Mr. Parrendo, 77, who has fashioned stained-glass iconography for area churches since 1950, has created high windows of rich greens and dark blues honoring Ireland's patron saints. St. Patrick's life is depicted from the time he was kidnapped and taken to Ireland to tend sheep, to the time when he held the shamrock to explain the holy trinity.

Mr. Wayhart and Denny Donnelly, president of the county AOH, took me from the church to Hunt Stained Glass Studios on the South Side where I met owner Nick Parrendo. He started pushing a broom there in June 1950 for 75 cents an hour. He long since has become both a scholar and artist, researching the saints in his studio library before grabbing a charcoal pencil. He works standing up, sketching on paper that he tapes to a tall roll of canvas, which he can spin like the cloth towel in an old-style dispenser.

"I do some reading and then I start moving the pencil over the shape,'' he tells me as he traces. "Then I throw some color on. That's all you do, and look, all of a sudden, here's a face already.''

Mr. Parrendo makes it sound easy, and his multi-level shop has a casual organization that seems the echo of a creative mind. When the Hibernians met him in his shop the first time, they knew they had their man.

Inner-city parishes have a tough go nowadays; Old St. Patrick's merged with nearby St. Stanislaus Kostka in 1993, and the little church's only regular Masses are Mondays and Thursdays at 12:10 p.m. Its postcard-perfect churchyard is kept trim only through the volunteer efforts of parishioner Dan Yates.

Such churches have been known to close, yet to a man, Mr. Wayhart said, the Hibernians believed in this cause. They have a long tradition of gifting windows, and they'd already had the church painted a couple of years back.

"Where's your heritage?'' Mr. Wayhart asked as we stood in the church. "How do you preserve that and protect it for the future? You have to start here.''

Mr. Walsh, who loved a good crowd, should get a fine one tomorrow.