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First, Catholicism is much more than what a bishop, even the bishop of Rome, may say off the cuff in answer to a reporter. As a Catholic, you’re free to have a negative opinion about how a priest or bishop phrases certain issues while still respecting the office that they hold. However, in many cases these quotes get ripped out of the context that makes them much more reasonable.
This statement comes from Pope Francis’s comments about a woman he met in a parish in Rome in 2015, who had given birth to seven children via C-section and was pregnant with her eighth child. According to one article:
“Does she want to leave the seven orphans?” “This is to tempt God,” [the pope] said, adding later: “That is an irresponsibility.” Catholics, the pope said, should speak of “responsible parenthood.”
“How do we do this?” Francis asked. “With dialogue. Each person with his pastor seeks how to do that responsible parenthood.”
“God gives you methods to be responsible,” he continued. “Some think that—excuse the word—that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No” (Jasmine Garsd, “Pope Francis Says Catholics Don’t Need to ‘Breed like Rabbits,’” npr.org).
In fact, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (HV) has an entire section on responsible parenthood. It says, in part,
With regard to physical, economic, psychological, and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have more children, and by those who, for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time (HV 10).
Rabbits don’t do this. Rabbits take a month to reproduce and don’t have a menstrual cycle. One female rabbit can produce one thousand offspring in her lifetime, which is necessary because 90 percent of rabbits die before they can reproduce. So, Pope Francis is making a perfectly valid point, but it could have been worded better, since a lot of people treat having more than two kids as “breeding like rabbits,” so it fuels anti-Catholic stereotypes.