With the farewell of the United Kingdom, the small village of Gadheim in northern Bavaria has taken the place of Westerngrund, another Bavarian town, about eighty kilometers further north-west from the new center. Gadheim was chosen on the basis of the calculations of the IGN, the French geographic institute, which calculated the location of the village by applying the "center of gravity" model to the EU territory to 27 Member States.
On behalf of the diocesan Caritas of Wurzburg, partner of "Caritas-Don Bosco" - the partnership body that manages the Salesian work in Würzburg - the former President of the Bavarian Parliament, Barbara Stamm, spoke on the occasion. Andreas Halbig, Dean of the Caritas-Don Bosco Educational Center and the local parish priest, Clemens Bieber, were among those who personally served the event's 300 guests, including the operators of the first German national network, ARD, who curated a live broadcast for the occasion.
The Salesian house in Würzburg is the first Salesian house founded in the territory of present-day Germany, in 1916. Today it is the independent entity "Caritas Don Bosco", the result of a collaboration between the diocesan Caritas Würzburg and the German Salesian Province. It is the largest Salesian work in Germany. The Salesian community is not located in Gadheim, but at the headquarters of the work, in Würzburg, which occupies the land of a historic former Irish-Scottish monastery (founded in the XII century).
In Gadheim, however, there is the hotel training institute “St. Markushof”, accompanied by a real three-star hotel. The other branches dependent on the Würzburg work are the "Kindertagesstätte Margherita" (KiTa), a nursery dedicated to Mother Margherita; a socio-emotional assistance center for young people who need continuous support, which currently also welcomes single mothers and refugees from other countries; and, above all, a Vocational Training Center (BBW) aimed at young people with mental disabilities, with autism spectrum disorders or with special needs in the field of learning.
