The first signs of demonic oppression?

Anger, says a Catholic involved full-time in deliverance. That’s what he sees.

We speak here of a former New York City police officer, Chris DeFlorio, who, with his wife Harmony, performs “minor” exorcisms. This they have been doing for several years.

There is anger — often, a constant fury, notes DeFlorio — with people thusly afflicted unable to stop talking and rehashing what is not even worthy of thought.

That, along with isolation, are markers: evil spirits seek to isolate and idle us. It’s one reason they find the infirm and elderly sitting ducks.

Young or old, New York is, of course, fertile ground for the enemy.

DeFlorio, who worked the dangerous 32nd Precinct in Manhattan (Harlem), remembers one time when he and other officers were called at two a.m. to the roof of a tenement at Eighth Avenue and 146th Street.

“The call came as a ‘jumper,'” DeFlorio recently told Spirit Daily. “Someone about to jump off the roof. We all went to the building, ran up the stairs.

“I was the first one to get up there, and when I did, I saw a woman, very disheveled, pacing back and forth, very unnatural. I tried to introduce myself — start a conversation with her — but immediately she looks up and says, ‘God doesn’t even know who you are.’ It was a deep, scratchy voice, something I wasn’t ready for. It was a very, very strange interaction, I’ll tell you right away. It set me back a little.”

And it came at a time when the DeFlorios were turning to active Christianity (at the beginning of a spiritual awakening).

Up to then, the officer never categorized cases as “demonic” or “oppressed” — though one can be sure of this: he and virtually every cop were walking into a spiritual dynamic on a regular basis.

“I was taken aback. We eventually talked her down, took her to the hospital, and as I began to talk to her more and more, she began to tell me she was also a ‘cutter.’ She cut her own skin. I remembered that in Mark, Chapter Five, the man by the tombs was cutting himself.”

And so began what is now a full-time deliverance ministry.

After the couple appeared on the huge Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), DeFlorio says he received more than a thousand phone calls.

And they welcomed it.

For one thing was immediately obvious: the need is at a desperate stage.

Though the number of exorcists is increasing (and rapidly, under Pope Francis, who asked every diocese to appoint at least one), exorcists still are overwhelmed, and there are still dioceses that resist exorcism (preferring a psychological explanation) and offer little or no assistance.

Can laypeople do such a thing?

For an answer one need only open a Bible and note how Christ said to His followers, “These signs will accompany those who believe: in my Name they will cast out demons” (Mark 16:16-18).

One may also note that at the very end of the Lord’s Prayer are what in effect constitute words of deliverance (though, yes, a priest with formal training and diocesan approval is needed in a case of full-scale possession).

Like official exorcists, Chris and Harmony also start with an intense evaluation of those seeking their assistance. Their introduction to deliverance came through non-denominational Pentecostals, but they returned to the Catholicism of their upbringing when they realized it had a far more organized approach based, as Chris points out, on many centuries of experience.

Born in Mineola, New York, DeFlorio says he once encountered a man who was possessed (slithering, biting his arm) during a trip to Rwanda. He also had a wake-up while on vacation at a high-end resort in Orlando (no, not Disney), where they had taken their daughter (accompanied by three of her friends) to celebrate “sweet 16.”

It didn’t turn out sweet in the room the girls shared.

Recalls Harmony: “The first night the girls woke up and spotted a huge handprint on the wall, and it only had four fingers. It wasn’t there the day before. It was enormous, not like a human handprint. The interesting thing was my daughter was filming the whole day before, a blogging thing for her friends, and you look at it and the handprint wasn’t there the night before.”

The DeFlorios tried to explain it away.

But, adds Chris, “The big event was the following morning, at six, there was like this sliding bathroom glass door. One of the girls hears banging, and she looks up and through the mirror on the wall she sees the sliding door going back and forth, and she could see a black figure behind the glass. She thought one of the other girls was in the bathroom. She gets up to look and sees that all the other girls are still in bed sleeping. So now she panics and wakes up the next girl and they get up and now they’re both panicking. They start to scream, and when they started to scream, there was one more slide of the door, a big bang, and the bathroom lights went out.”

That was 2019 and it was another up-close-and-personal encounter with actual, metaphysical evil. Chris had been reading every book he could find on exorcism and ended up doing a “minor exorcism” (in effect a house blessing) of the room, after which everything calmed down.

Most evil is far more subtle.

And from time to time, in this world of trial, it afflicts all.

We might add that demons seek to divide, strip us of love, create pretense, and often, as the very first sign, cause confusion or anxiety.

When it manifests in blatant ways, it’s time to stop, take stock, find protection with Confession (and the Precious Blood), use Holy Water and blessed salt, plead His Mercy, and kick whatever it is out (with the assistance of a priest, if it’s at that stage, or a deliverance expert, if a priest cannot be found).

[The DeFlorios can be reached at: [email protected] or 516-778-3324 or their Facebook page]