By stressing the Christian nature of the old kingdom, he hoped to increase the attachment of Kongo parishioners to the Catholic Church as opposed to Protestantism or traditional religions.
In his articles, which initially bore the title "Lusansu" Cuvelier began writing a history of Kongo using oral traditions that he collected combined with increasingly detailed historical documentation.
His inspiration came from reading a manuscript written in 1913 by two catechists, Mpetelo Boka, and Lievan Sakala Mboku, for Cuvelier's manuscript, "Kongo een vroeger eeuw" (Kongo in earlier centuries) written in 1926 already incorporates their writing as well as citations from well-known 17th-century writers such as Giovanni Cavazzi da Montecuccolo.
Typically he called these notebooks "Mvila" from the Kikongo term for a clan or its heraldic motto, the common stuff of Kongo oral tradition.
Upon his death in 1962, Cuvelier's papers including many unpublished manuscripts, book and article drafts, transcriptions and translations of documentation relevant to Kongo history, and his precious field notebooks went to the Redemptorist archive in Leuven, Belgium, and in 2000 were transferred to the Archives of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.