Exactly my point. For Luther to suddenly decide, "hey, this Purgatory stuff is bunk," after 1500 years, is ludicrous. The only way to justify this was to remove anything that explicitly spoke to this belief. Since Maccabees was part of the "Apocrypha", it was easier to just say it's canonicity was not only in doubt, but false (incredible chutzpah!), dragging the other books out with it. Let's not forget that Luther also wanted to remove James, but since it was not deuterocanonical, there was no cover for his opposition to a letter that stresses works as an essential partner to faith. Thus, it remained.
Let us also not forget that the Pope and bishops all across Europe were torturing people to death in fire for disagreeing with them, and that virtually all of the High Clergy of the Catholic Church of that time went to Hell and may still be there, because they were sadistic murderers and oppressors.
Luther was not simply reacting to doctrinal issues. If the arguments were just doctrinal, Luther would probably not have been so stubborn and walked out of the Church. They threatened to torture Luther to death. They DID torture thousands of people to death. Luther looked at that, and by that very fact he KNEW that the Catholic Church was being led by the Devil - "You will know them by their fruits", Jesus said.
And Luther was RIGHT.
The murdering, burning, flaying torturing Catholic Church of the Reformation was led by murderous fiends in the service of the Devil. Every Pope that ordered men burnt alive for disagreeing with him or challenging him was in fact a thrall of Satan and NOT a heaven-bound servant of God.
That the Catholic DOCTRINES were right does not save the Catholic Church from the fact that Luther was RIGHT to march out of that Devil-possessed den of torturing sadists.
Catholicism had to be broken in order to save it from the demonic possession that took it over in the form of homicidal use of supreme authority.
Having good doctrine was not enough to save the Catholic Church of 1540 from being a foul, sadistic, demon-led horror.
Luther was wrong.
But Luther was right.
The Pope was right.
But he was also very wrong.
And everyone today who carries on the fights of the 16th Century is wrong.
What matters is fruit.
The holiest Christians of today are the holy martyrs, Catholic and Pentecostal, dying in Chinese camps.
The holiest Christians of the 19th Century were the abolitionist Quakers who spirited people to freedom, which Catholic Europe and Protestant America still enslaved them.
Right doctrines are worth nothing when stacked up against slavery and torture and murder.
You will know them by their fruits supersedes being right on some niggling point of script.
Being a Bible Believing Jesus-praising Christian will not save you if you are sending me to be burned to death.
The Popes of the Reformation, and the Protestant fathers who broke from them but them gleefully took up the stake and the rack for their own authoritative purposes all went to Hell.
Maybe they were purified there and eventually went to heaven.
Maybe not.
In any case, Pope Leo and Luther were both murderers, and foul human beings for that reason, and most of us are their moral superiors and need not pay and never mind to the doctrines they thought were important enough to kill people over. They were both wrong. They were both evil.
The Reformation was both wrong and necessary, because the Catholic Church was both right and evil.
Now we can be right and not evil.
And that is what we should all focus on, making good fruit.
We should all shut up about the doctrinal bickering until we are each morally perfect.
And since that will not come in this life, it means we should just all shut up.
We'll all find out, soon enough.
We'll all, or almost all, go to Hell, be purified, and go to heaven.
And since none of us have committed murder or ordered torture, we're both a damned sight ahead of Pope Leo and Luther.