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And no Catholic believes that any prelate, no matter what his authority, can save or damn a man by anything that prelate says or does.

And what about all the times I've read here the claims that the Petrine succession compels God to honor what the Roman church binds or looses here on earth? Not by you but by many others.

Here's a well-written example. Excerpt:

Finally, Jesus says, "Whatever you declare bound on earth shall be bound in heaven; whatever you declare loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven." This is rabbinic terminology. A rabbi could bind, declaring an act forbidden or excommunicating a person for serious sin; or a rabbi could loose, declaring an act permissible or reconciling an excommunicated sinner to the community.

Are you somehow suggesting that excommunicating a Roman believer does not cut them off from heaven? That ignoring or avoiding the sacraments of the Roman church is unimportant? The Rome's sacraments are meaningless to your eternal fate?

You can't have it both ways. Pick one or the other. Either your priests, via your pope and the laying on of hands to authorize bishops who then authorize priests, have the power to bind or to loose (and them alone) or the power of the priest in confession and eucharist are a fraud. And if they have the powers generally claimed, then to withhold them does in fact curse a sinner into hell.

I notice that you completely ignored the self-contradictory nature of your own claims.

But on the point to which you did respond, I think you've misunderstood exactly what the sacraments and excommunication from them means.

The sacraments are the ordinary means of grace - the way that Christ ordained for his Church to share the merits of His blood with believers.

If a person does something to incur excommunication, then they have denied themselves the sacraments: the ordinary means of grace.

But there are also extraordinary means of grace - one salient Scriptural example is Christ's appearance to Saul on the road to Damascus: a special grace of salvation being shared with an unbeliever who was actively persecuting the Church.

Excommunication does not mean the automatic and irreversible death of the soul: it is a warning to someone who is in peril.

The final arbiter of a soul's destiny, as He is of everything else, is God. The Church is God's vicegerent and servant.