I’m all for the “pure BS” school on this one. With the intriguing exception, likely a coincidence, of John Paul II, correlating the pope with the phrase is absolutely ridiculous. “Look, he has to be ‘flowers of flowers,’ he put flowers on his crest!”... like a whopping portion of other popes.
“Shepherd and Mariner! Dude the guy was a bishop and they called him a shepherd... how uncanny is that!!!”
As if every other pope in history since Peter wasn’t a shepherd!
“Yeah, but they also said he’d be a Mariner!”
Pope Ken Grifffey, Jr.? Come on, he was a Cardinal and a Padre, but not a Mariner.
“Dude, he was like from Venice. That’s a maritime city?”
...in a country where you can’t go more than 100 miles from the shore...
Lol!