Cuba used to uphold that marxism was contradictory to being a catholic; their allowal of catholics into the party is a more recent (last 40ish years afaik) thing, resulting in part from the catholic church in cuba becoming less reactionary and partly from the party no longer worrying about these sorts of unproveable metaphysical debates. Being materialist requires, first and formost, starting from the premise of actual living people who must producr food before they can think, and secondmost investigatig the actual conditions and experiences before drawing a provisional conclusion, not a final conclusion for all time and certainly not adherence to this or that dogma as absolute truth.

For context, i come at this sort of topic with a lotta concern about how these sorts of views have resulted in chauvinist policies against indigenous peoples (including unfortunate examples of residential schools in the ussr to "exterminate superstition"). For all societies before europe in the 1600s, spiritual "metaphors" were the entire way they understood the empirical world; that is why, for example, so many of the life saving drugs stolen by western pharma from indigenous peoples, have "spiritual" stories attached to them to explain use, location, etc. When instead of examining the specific claims made by real people we dismiss them bc they dont align with dogma we fail to be materialists and pass into a phony idealist materialism that often makes us miss out on actually useful discoveries, as well as being chauvinistic.