A PR move. If he was an adjunct, it means non-tenured. They are contracted semester-by-semester, though possibly he might have had some arrangement more steady than that, but certainly not protection of tenure. So he can readily be non-renewed.
And yes, if he was on a sessional contracts, then he was not “fired” but simply not contracted again. Sessional positions have no presumption of renewal, though de facto he may well have been treated as a steady renewal and this breaks that.
But it’s mostly inconsequential as far as BC is concerned—a PR plus for the broad middle of the constituency and the only downside is with the really radical feminists who haven’t given up on women’s ordination yet (despite infallible papal pronouncements in 1976 and 1994, clarified as irreformable by a later official response to a “dubium” [request for clarification]).
It may not be huge, but it’s a step in the right direction.
I’d like to see somebody (the local bishop, in other words) get after his order on disciplining him, or otherwise withdrawing from the diocese. Even a religious order can only operate in a diocese with the permission of the bishop.