Sunday’s traditional late-night Mass will officially change to 9 p.m. beginning on Aug. 23, the first Sunday of the next academic year, Director of Campus Ministry Lisa Reiter has confirmed.

Reiter addressed last night’s 10 p.m. Mass congregation about the change, and then she said she remained in the back so that students would feel that they had ample opportunity to voice any concerns about the decision.

“The 10 p.m. mass is dear to my heart,” she said last night. “If I thought that the quality of the worship would be impacted by the change in time, I would never have asked the department to ask [about a time change].”

She said today that she has already started to receive a good deal of positive feedback about the time change.

Ultimately, Reiter said the decision to change the hour of the Mass came down to input she received from students. She said she looked closely to see whether students opposed to the change could cite reasons why the time change would make the Mass inaccessible to them, but often times found this wasn’t the case. Reiter also examined why students were in favor of the time change, and said she found that they could generally give valid reasons about what the benefits of switching to 9 p.m. would be; for instance, she said it wasn’t so much the start time but how late it finished that was keeping students away.

According to the survey results, 60 percent of students were either satisfied or very satisfied with the prospect of the time change. More than 85 percent of the students said that they would attend about the same amount or more often if the time changed to 9 p.m.

Reiter said the start time of the Mass wasn’t the most important part of the tradition, but rather, making it as available to the community as possible.

“It is the community of people who gather, it is their generosity, the holiness that they bring to this liturgy and how it all comes together that really . makes it so meaningful and sacred,” she said. “It appears that from the feedback we received that moving to 9 [p.m.] will allow more people to be a part of that faith community.”