Protestants tore books out of the Bible / Catholics added extra books at Trent

The seven books in question (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, plus additions to Esther and Daniel) had disputed status for the entire life of the church before Luther or the Council of Trent ever said a formal word about them. Jerome, translating the Vulgate in the late 4th century, insisted on what he called the hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth, and left these books out of his working canon because the Jewish tradition he was drawing from didn't include them either. He called them useful for edification but not for establishing doctrine, and said so bluntly in prefaces that annoyed his contemporaries. Augustine took the opposite view, and church councils at Rome (382), Hippo (393), and Carthage (397) sided closer to Augustine, using lists that included the disputed books. For roughly a thousand years afterward, the Western church mostly lived with that tension unresolved rather than settling it.

When Luther produced his German Bible in 1534, he didn't cut the books out. He moved them into their own labeled section between the Testaments, calling them "useful and good to read" but not equal to Scripture for doctrine, which is essentially Jerome's old position revived. The original 1611 King James Bible printed the same books in that same separate section, clearly marked "Apocrypha." It wasn't until the British and Foreign Bible Society's 1826 decision, driven mainly by printing costs rather than a fresh doctrinal ruling, that English Protestant Bibles started routinely dropping the section altogether, and the King James Version itself didn't stop including it as standard until around 1885. So "Protestants removed them" telescopes a publishing drift of two and a half centuries into one Reformation-era act, and Luther himself wasn't the one doing the removing.

The Catholic half of the claim doesn't fare better under the same test. The Council of Trent's 1546 decree didn't add anything to the Bible. It formally reaffirmed a canon list that already existed from those 4th-century councils, issued in direct response to Luther downgrading the disputed books. Neither side invented a position in the 16th century. Protestants eventually formalized Jerome's older minority view; Catholics formalized Augustine's older majority view. Both views had already been on the table for a thousand years before either side made theirs official.