PROVIDENCE To many people, he will always be remembered as the Christian Brother willing to play God’s fool, a campus minister not afraid to put on his dancing shoes and makeup and play the clown for Christ’s sake.

To others, he’s the brother whose dedication to the ideals of his order’s founder, St. John Baptist de La Salle, prompted him to reach out to the needy in unusual ways –– from counseling Latino youths who had landed in the Training School for gang-related crimes to leading support groups for parents who had lost a child to homicide.

But while Brother Charles Kitson will tell you that his 34 years here as a De La Salle Christian Brother (and three other years as a brother in Guatemala) have been wonderful indeed, he is moving on.

At the request of the order’s Superior General, Brother Alvaro Rodriguez, Kitson, 59, has said his goodbye to Providence and is heading off to Rome to assume the role of coordinator for the various Lasallian lay movements around the world.

In that new role as Secretary for the Lasallian Family and Association, Brother Charles will be traveling to 82 countries that have Christian Brothers, looking to forge a deeper connection between the order’s 6,000 professed brothers and an estimated 900,000 young and adult lay partners.

To be sure, the Christian Brothers have long drawn their inspiration from their 17th-century saint-founder, John Baptist de La Salle, who after being born into a wealthy family in Rheims, France, was ordained a priest and moved, little by little, to create schools for the poor and the needy.

Brother Charles, whose own inspiration for joining the brothers came from seeing how happy they were, “regular guys doing God’s work,” says that it was while he was working as a campus minister at La Salle Academy that he and two other brothers decided to make their commitment to the poor more real by moving into a small house on Potters Avenue.

Around the same time it had become apparent that the number of young people joining the religious life was declining around the world. The Christian Brothers decided to try something new: they would harness the energy of young lay volunteers who though not willing to become brothers were willing to live the life of a brother at least for a while.

The approach has been very much in evidence in Providence where for the last 14 years Brother Charles and Brother Lawrence Goyette, founder of the San Miguel School, have usually had at least two lay men or women living at their Miguel House on Manton Avenue in Olneyville, sharing prayers, meals and cleaning while volunteering at the school. “They make a commitment for one year, but most stay for two,” says Brother Charles. “It has deepened their spirituality.”

It’s one of the models that Brother Charles’ superiors would like to see him replicate around the world.

“My job will be to encourage and animate these partnerships on a worldwide basis, and to pull together some good working models. It’s exciting. You have to wonder what God has in store for the Christian Brothers.”

The brother acknowledges that when he was first asked to become the Secretary for the Lasallian Family and Association he wasn’t exactly thrilled.

For the last five years he has been a social worker at San Miguel, which provides tuition-free education to some of Rhode Island’s neediest. He had also been working for 14 years in another Christian Brothers ministry, Tides Family Services, the last six years of which he has been visiting the Rhode Island Training School to counsel youths charged with violent crimes.

“It gives you a real understanding of how damaged some kids are today,” he says. “But if you can get to them in a non-threatening way, you’ll often see a little boy inside just eager to make some changes if he only knew how.”

Brother Charles says that when he was initially asked by the Superior General to take the assignment in Rome, he replied, “You are asking me to let go everything I believe I’m good at.”

He accepted the assignment on the condition that he first be given two weeks to allow his heart to become as passionate about his new assignment as he had been with all the others.

It’s all a far cry from the situation that a much younger Brother Charles faced 37 years ago when he first stepped into his assignment as a classroom teacher at St. Raphael Academy in Pawtucket.

He had tried to emulate the tough-as-nails demeanor that he had seen other brothers use, only to see his students laugh. He was 21, and looked not much older than his students.

Dispirited, he went to his superiors and asked that they make him the cook instead.

But the brothers knew him better than he knew himself, and told him to be himself. It proved to be crucial advice. Though he had always been, like his father, a good dancer, he had always assumed it was something that he should keep under wraps because “Christian Brothers didn’t dance.”

But in the 1980s, as campus minister at La Salle, the brother dared to put his talents to work. Encouraging the students to put on a multi-media Holy Week play, replete with jazz dancing and strobe lighting, Brother Charles played the lead role as a jazz-dancing “fool for Christ.”

“That’s always been my vocation,” he would explain later. “To be a brother is to be a fool for Christ.”

The show proved to be such a hit that the La Salle Fools, as the troupe was known, took the show on the road, and the show became an annual event at La Salle for the next six years. When his work in the South Providence neighborhoods inspired him to go to work in Guatemala, Brother Charles thought his public dancing days were finally over. But he soon came to discover that the same talents were in demand as much there.

The first couple of years in Guatemala he used basically the same script he had used at La Salle, which was perfect, he said, because he knew that his performance as a jazz-dancing mime didn’t require him to be fluent in Spanish. But in his final year in Guatemala, Brother Charles wrote a new play based on the theme of justice. He did it because he wanted get across the message that “as a church we are the voice for the voiceless.”

When he returned to Rhode Island, Brother Charles again thought his dancing days were over; that is, until he was asked to start a dance team at San Miguel.

Is it possible that his dancing days really are over now?

He says he’s much older than when he was putting on two-hour plays at La Salle Academy. He also opines that there may not be as much of a demand for dancing brothers at the order’s motherhouse in Rome as there had been at La Salle Academy, San Miguel School and in Guatemala.

But he has been proven wrong before and he may be proven wrong once again.

rdujardi@projo.com