Diamond:
Pope Gregory the Great states a personal opinion about 1 Macabees, which is 1 of the 7 Deuterocanoncicals. He made no such statements about the other 6. However, the question that has to be asked is whether or not he called a Council in his lifetime while he was Pope, which was 590 to 604 AD, off the top of my head. My remembering of that quote was in the context of a theological commentary on the Book of Job and while he may have personally questioned the canonicity of 1 Macabees, Pope Gregory never called a Council to remove it from the Canon nor could he in his on person do such a thing as the Pope, while having his own personal views, can’t make them binding on the Church.
So, while Pope Gregory personally questioned the Canonicity of 1 Macabees, he never as Bishop of Rome, thus Pope, did anything to try and have it removed from the Canon.
If the canon were already settled beyond dispute why do all the encyclopedias state that it was not authoritatively settled until Trent, and further, if it were already settled at Hippo and Carthage, why would Trent's Canon on the subject have been necessary? Why did the Council of Trullo authoritatively sanction the canons of Athanasius, Amphilocius and Basil the Great who separate the majority of the Apocryphal books from the canon? Why then did Roman Catholic scholars of the 16th century who followed Jerome on the subject and explicitly stated in their editions of the Bible, published by the authority and consent of Popes, that the Apocrypha are not to be received as canonical, but may be read in the churches for purposes of edification?
Also, as far as I can tell, the "Greek Esdras" (Septuagint Esdras I) which contains loose versions of parts of 2 Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, and a long section that is not in the Hebrew Bible was accepted without suspicion in the early church. It included in the Canons of Hippo and Carthage. However, it was excluded from the Canon at Trent.
Cordially,