Salvation is never decided by the label Catholic. It rests on Christ alone, received by faith. Wherever a person is resting in Christ rather than their own merit, He is enough, and that is true inside every tradition.
The Grace Answer
This question usually arrives loaded, so let us move the line to where the Bible actually draws it. Salvation was never about which building you attend or which label is on the door. It is about one thing: is your trust resting on the finished work of Christ, or partly on yourself?
It is worth being fair about what the Catholic Church actually confesses, because caricatures help no one. Historic Catholicism affirms the Trinity, the full deity of Christ, His death and bodily resurrection, and the necessity of grace. No faithful Catholic believes they save themselves by sheer effort. The real disagreement is narrower and serious: how grace, faith, the sacraments, merit, and justification fit together, and whether human cooperation becomes part of the basis on which a person is declared righteous.
Where the concern actually lies
Scripture is relentless that you are saved by grace through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works. And if it is by grace, then it is no longer of works, or grace would not be grace. The sufficiency of the cross gets obscured wherever human merit is added as part of the ground of justification, in any church, under any label. That is the heart of it. Not the name on the sign, but whether anything is being stitched onto the finished work as though it were not already finished.
So can a Catholic be saved? Certainly, if their trust is in Christ alone, and many within that tradition rest in Him deeply and would tell you He is their only hope. A person is not saved or lost because of the word Catholic. They are saved by resting in Christ, and endangered only where their own merit quietly becomes the thing they are counting on.
And we do not get to assign individual souls to heaven or hell. That belongs to God, who reads hearts we cannot see, and the Judge of all the earth will do right. Our job is simpler and kinder: point every person, in every tradition, to the same door. Christ, and Christ alone. Keep the main thing the main thing, refuse to make yourself the gatekeeper of another person’s soul, and trust the God who sees every heart to judge with perfect mercy and perfect justice.